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HIGGINSON 




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National ^tutjies in American ILett^ts. 



OLD CAMBRIDGE. 

By Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 

IN PREPARATION. 
THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ^OVEL. 
By Paul Leicester Fori^ 

THE knickerbockers';^^ 
By The Rev. Henry van Dyke, D.D. 

SOUTHERN HUMORISTS. 

By John Kendrick Bangs. 

BROOK FARM. 

By Lindsay Swift. 

THE CLERGY IN AMERICAN LIFE AND 
LETTERS. 

By The Rev. Daniel Dulaney Addison. 

FLOWER OF ESSEX. 
By The Editor. 

Others to he announced. 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 



BY 



THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 

AUTHOR OF "TALES OP THE ENCHAn'teD ISLANDS OF 
THE ATLANTIC," ETC., ETC. 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LOxNDON: MACMILLAN & CO.. Ltd. 
1899 

A/^ rights reserved 













Copyright, 1899, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Nortoooi ^rcgs 

J. S. Cushiug & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. OLD CAMBRIDGE I 

II. OLD CAMBRIDGE IN THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 4I 

III. HOLMES 73 

IV. LONGFELLOW IO9 

V. LOWELL . 145 

VI. INDEX 197 

V 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 

"Old Cambridge," as it was formerly called, 
to distinguish it from the later settlements called 
East Cambridge and Cambridgeport, is one of 
the few American towns that may be said to 
have owed their very name and existence to the 
pursuits of letters. Laid out originally by Gov- 
ernor John Winthrop as a fortified town, — fur- 
nished soon after with a "pallysadoe," of which 
the large willows on Holmes's Field are the last 
lingering memorial, — it might nevertheless have 
gone the way of many abortive early settlements, 
had it not been for the establishment of Har- 
vard College there. We Cambridge boys early 
learned, however, that this event was due mainly 
to the renown attained, as a preacher and au- 
thor, by the Rev. Thomas Shepard, known in 
his day as "the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, 
and soul-ravishing Mr. Shepard," a graduate of 
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, England, who 
3 



4 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

came to America in 1635. A voluminous au- 
thor, some of whose works are yet reprinted 
in England, he was the ruling spirit of the 
Cambridge synod, which was held in 1637 to 
pronounce against "antinomian and familistic 
opinions." He was described by his contem- 
poraries as a "poor, weak, pale-complectioned 
man," yet such was his power that the synod 
condemned under his guidance "about eighty 
opinions, some blasphemous, other erroneous, 
all unsound," as even the tolerant Winthrop 
declared. By this and his other good deeds 
he so won the confidence of the leaders of the 
colony that when a college was to be founded, 
Cotton Mather tells us, " Cambridge rather than 
any other place was fixed upon to be the seat 
of that happy seminary." On the wrecks of 
eighty unsound or blasphemous opinions there 
was thus erected one happy seminary. And 
the college also brought with it the name of 
the English university city, so that the settle- 
ment first called "Newetowne" became in May, 
1638, Cambridge, and has thus ever since re- 
mained. And so essentially was the college 
the centre of the whole colony, as well as of 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 5 

the town, that there exists among the manu- 
scripts of the Massachusetts Historical Society 
a memorandum, dated September 30, 1783, to 
the effect that in the early days the persons ap- 
pointed to lay out roads into the interior did 
it only so far as "the bank by Mrs. Biglow's 
house in Weston," and that this they consid- 
ered to be quite as far as would ever be neces- 
sary, it being "about seven miles from the 
college in Cambridge." 

Fifty years ago, Cambridge boys knew all 
this tradition very well; and they knew also 
that the soul-ravishing Mr. Shepard, after pub- 
lishing a dozen or so of his books in Eng- 
land, printed the last two upon the press which 
came to Cambridge in the very year when the 
town assumed its name. We all knew the 
romance of the early arrival of this press ; that 
the Rev. Joseph Glover, a dissenting minister, 
had embarked for the colony in 1638 with his 
wife, his press, his types, and his printer, Ste- 
phen Daye ; that Mr. Glover died on the pas- 
sage, but the press arrived safely and was at 
length put in the house of President Dunster, 
of Harvard College; that this good man took 



6 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

into his charge not merely the printing appa- 
ratus, but the Widow Glover, whom he finally 
made his wife. For forty years all the print- 
ing done in the British Colonies in America was 
done on this press, Stephen Daye being followed 
by his son Matthew, and he by Samuel Green. 
We know that the first work printed here was 
" The Freeman's Oath," in 1639 ; and that about 
a hundred books were thus printed before 1700, 
this including Eliot's English Bible. It was 
not till 1674, nearly forty years later, that a 
press was set up in Boston ; and Thomas in his 
" History of Printing " says that *' the press of 
Harvard College was, for a time, as celebrated 
as the press of the Universities of Oxford 
and Cambridge in England." 

And not merely were the foundations of the 
town and of the college thus laid in literature, 
but the early presidents of Harvard were usually 
selected, not merely for soundness of doctrine, — 
which was not always their strong point, — but 
for their scholarship and even supposed literary 
taste. President Dunster, for instance, was 
an eminent Oriental scholar and performed also 
the somewhat dubious service of preparing the 



OED CAMBRIDGE 7 

"New England Psalm Book." As originally 
compiled it had dissatisfied Cotton Mather, who 
had hoped " that a little more of art was to be 
employed in it," and good Mr. Shepard thus 
ventured to criticise its original compilers, the 
Rev. Richard Mather of Dorchester and the 
Rev. Messrs. Eliot and Welde of Roxbury : — 

You Roxb'ry poets, keep clear of the crime 

Of missing to give us very good rhyme, 

And you of Dorchester, your verses lengthen 

But with the text's own words you will them strengthen. 

Presidents Charles Chauncey and Urian Oakes 
published a few sermons — the latter offering 
one with the jubilant title, *'The Unconquerable, 
All Conquering and More than Conquering 
Soldier," which was appropriately produced on 
what was then called Artillery Election in 1674. 
President Increase Mather was one of the most 
voluminous authors of the Puritan period, and 
from his time (1701) down to the present day 
there have been few presidents of Harvard 
University who were not authors. 

All these men we Cambridge children knew, 
not by their writings, from which we happily 



8 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

escaped, but from their long-winded Latin in- 
scriptions on the flat stones in the Cambridge 
cemetery. These we studied and transcribed 
and, with a good deal of insecurity, translated ; 
indeed, one boy whom I knew well, son of the 
college librarian, made a book of them all, 
which is still known to collectors. 

Thus we learned of President Charles 
Chauncey, who died in 1672, that his tomb was 
the grave of '^ praesidis vigilantissimiy viri ptane 
integerrimiy concionatoris eximii^ pietate pariter 
ac liberali ernditione ornatissimi." It seemed to 
us far more impressive than the tenderer tribute 
to his wife, who died four years before him : — 

Here lies enterr'd w*Mn this Shrine 
A spirit meeke, a Soule divine, 
Endowed w'^. grace, & piety 
Excelling in humility : 
Preferring Gods commands above 
All fine delights & this World's love. 

We used to read also of the Rev. Edward 
Wigglesworth, S. T. D. (1765), whose virtues 
took thirty-three lines to inscribe them, and of 
whom it is recorded that he made his Hebrew 
lectures not only profitable for teaching, but 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 9 

delightful to all cultivated minds (Ad docendum 
mire accomodatas, literatis item omftibiis proba- 
tissimas reddiderimt). He was also, " Conjiix 
peramansy parens benevolentissimns'' ; and it is 
expressly stated that while he was candid in 
controversy he was also exceedingly vigorous 
— '' Simul et acer, nervostiSy praepotens extitity 
If so, it is not strange that Dr. Chauncey in his 
sketch of him praises his ** catholic spirit and 
conduct, in spite of great temptations to the 
contrary." 

From these we turned to the humbler tomb 
of Thomas Longhorn, the town drummer, who 
died in 1685, "aged about 6S years," or of 
Thomas Fox, whose death was in 1693, and 
who had a quarter of a century before been 
ordered by the selectmen to " look to the youth 
in time of public worship, & to inform against 
such as he find disorderly " ; or, perhaps 
with vague curiosity to that of "Jane, a negro 
servant to Andrew Boardman," who died in 
1 74 1, when Massachusetts still held slaves. 

These larger tombs, by reason of their hori- 
zontal position, afforded excellent seats for 
schoolboys, intent perhaps on exploring the 



10 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

results of their walnutting or chestnutting ; or 
possibly a defiant nap might be there indulged. 
I have often wished that I had learned from 
Lowell on which of them he sat during that 
Hallowe'en night when he watched there vainly 
for ghosts. 

Only one of these longer epitaphs was in 
English; and the frequent ^^Eheu^' or '' O spes 
inanis^' in the others, made us feel that emotion 
as well as accuracy might exist in Latin. Mod- 
ern cemeteries never seem to me very awe-in- 
spiring; but the old New England graveyards, 
especially in college towns, impressed on the 
boyish mind not only the dignity of virtue, but 
of knowledge ; of this world's honors and gran- 
deurs perhaps, but never of its financial treasures. 
I can find only one epitaph in the Cambridge 
churchyard which mentions that the person 
commemorated was a man of wealth ; and that 
is on the grave of a non-collegiate man, whose 
inscription is in EngHsh. But we noticed that 
at the end of the tombstone of the Rev. Samuel 
Appleton, after all the sonorous Latin the 
climax came in those superb words from the 
English Vulgate : " They that be wise shall shine 



"K 



OLD CAMBRIDGE tt 

as the brightness of the firmament. And they 
that turn many to righteousness as the stars 
forever and ever." 

I have dwelt upon this churchyard because it 
is perfectly certain that every Cambridge boy in 
1830 drew from it as distinct a sense of an his- 
toric past and of the dignity of letters as any 
English boy receives when he glances downward, 
while waiting for the Temple Church in Lon- 
don to open its doors, and sees beneath his feet /y^<>* ^^ 
the name of Oliver Goldsmith. Through its ..^ ^ t>\ 
influence we naturally thought of the academical '^ 8^5 ^ 
virtues — dignity, learning, the power of leader- 
ship — as being the great achievement of life, 
while all else was secondary. On the other hand, \,!^ J ^] 
the empty diamond-shaped cavities on many of ^ff*^ "^ 
the tombs represented the places where leaden 
escutcheons had been converted into bullets for 
the army of the American Revolution. Holmes 
and Longfellow both described the place in their 
poems ; and it is certain that the Cambridge 
muses would not have been just what they were 
without the old churchyard. 

Cambridge children also discovered that 
during the eighteenth century the Harvard pro- 



■ 0} ' ^ 



'■■*>J=g*" 



12 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

fessors, if not literary men, were at least scholars, 
according to the standard of their time. Samuel 
Sewall, grand-nephew of the celebrated judge 
of that name, first taught the grammar school in 
Cambridge, and then (1762) became college 
librarian and instructor in Hebrew. He pub- 
lished a Hebrew grammar, a Latin version of 
the first book of Young's " Night Thoughts," 
and various poems and orations in Greek and 
Latin ; and he left behind him a manuscript 
Chaldee and English dictionary, which still re- 
poses unpublished in the College Library. His 
kinsman, Jonathan Sewell (not Sewall), born in 
Cambridge (1766), became an eminent lawyer 
and legal writer in Canada, was one of the first 
to propose Canadian federation, in a pamphlet 
(181 5), and left a work on *' The Judicial History 
of France, so far as it relates to the Law of the 
Province of Lower Canada." The eighteenth 
century also brought the physical sciences on 
their conquering course, to Harvard College, 
displacing the established curriculum of theology 
and philology ; but Professor Goodale has shown 
that they really came in as a branch of theology, 
or of what is called " pastoral care," since the 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 1 3 

clergy of that day were also largely the medical 
advisers of their people and had to be instructed 
for that function. The first Professor of Mathe- 
matics and Philosophy, Isaac Greenwood, was 
not appointed until 1727 ; he was followed (1738) 
by John Winthrop, who was greatly in advance 
of the science of the day, and whose two lectures 
on comets, delivered in the College Chapel in 
1759, are still good reading. The year 1783 
saw the founding of the Harvard Medical 
School ; and although this was situated in Boston, 
the Botanic Garden was in Cambridge and under 
the supervision (182 5-1 834) of a highly educated 
English observer, Thomas Nuttall, whose works 
on botany and ornithology were pioneers in New 
England. These books we read, on the very 
ground which had produced them ; and Nuttall's 
charming accounts of birds, especially, were as 
if written in our own garden and orchard. 

We further discovered that in passing from 
the eighteenth to the nineteenth century Old 
Cambridge passed from the domain of a some- 
what elementary science to a more than ele- 
mentary literature. The appointment of John 
Quincy Adams (1806) as Professor of Rhetoric 



14 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

and Oratory, had a distinct influence on the 
literary tendencies of Cambridge, and his two 
volumes of lectures still surprise the reader by 
their good sense and judgment. Levi Hedge, 
about the same time (1810), became Professor of 
Logic and Metaphysics, and he furnished what 
was for many years the standard American text- 
book on the former subject. A few years more 
brought to Cambridge (between 181 1 and 1822) 
a group of men at that time unequalled in this 
country as regarded general cultivation and the 
literary spirit, — Andrews Norton, Edward 
Everett, Joseph Green Cogswell, George Tick- 
nor, Washington Allston, Jared Sparks, Edward 
T. Channing, Richard H. Dana, and George 
Bancroft. Most of them were connected with 
the University, the rest were resident in Cam- 
bridge, but all had their distinct influence on 
the atmosphere in which the Cambridge authors 
grew. Professor Edward T. Channing espe- 
cially — grand-uncle of the present Professor 
of similar name — probably trained as many 
conspicuous authors as all other American 
instructors put together. 

It has also an important bearing on the 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 1 5 

present volume when we observe that the effect 
of all this influence was to create not merely 
individual writers, but literary families. The 
Rev. Abiel Holmes, D.D., author of "The 
Annals of America," came to Cambridge as 
pastor of the First Church in 1809; and both his 
sons, Oliver Wendell and John, became authors 
— the one being known to all English readers, 
while the other, with perhaps greater original 
powers, was known only to a few neighbors. 
The Ware family, coming in 1825, was a race of 
writers, including the two Henrys, John, Will- 
iam, John F. W., and George. Richard Dana, 
the head of the Boston bar in his day, was a 
native of Cambridge (1699); as was his son 
Francis Dana, equally eminent and followed in 
lineal succession by Richard Henry Dana, the 
poet ; and by his son of the same name, author 
of " Two Years before the Mast." The Channing 
family, closely connected with the Danas, was 
successively represented in Cambridge by Pro- 
fessor E. T. Channing, the Rev. W. H. Chan- 
ning, and Professor Edward Channing. With 
them must be associated Washington Allston, 
whose prose and verse were as remarkable as 



1 6 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

his paintings, and whose first wife was a Chan- 
ning, and whose second wife a Dana. Rev. 
Charles Lowell came to live in Cambridge in 
1819, and he and his children, the Rev. 
R. T. S. Lowell, James Russell Lowell, and 
Mrs. S. R. Putnam, were all authors. Judge 
Joseph Story, the most eminent legal writer 
whom America has produced, resided for many 
years in Cambridge (i 829-1 845), as did his son, 
William Wetmore Story, author and sculptor, 
and his son-in-law, George Ticknor Curtis, legal 
writer and historian. Benjamin Peirce, who 
was college librarian (1826-183 1), was father of 
the celebrated mathematician of that name ; 
and his two grandchildren, James Mills Peirce 
and Charles Sanders Peirce, have followed 
with distinction in the same path. The Rev. 
John G. Palfrey, the historian of New England, 
bequeathed similar tastes to his children, both 
of his sons having contributed to military his- 
tory, while his oldest daughter has written both 
poetry and fiction under the name of " E. Fox- 
ton." Professor Charles Eliot Norton, in the 
same way, has prolonged and enhanced the 
literary eminence of his name, as did Professor 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 



17 



F. H. Hedge and Tutor William Everett. Other 
instances of literary families — more, perhaps, 
than any other place in America has produced 
— might be added to these ; but these are 
enough to show how a literary atmosphere was 
produced by which the young people of Cam- 
bridge were inevitably moulded. The passage 
into literature seemed an easy thing when so 
many of one's elders had already accomplished 
it, each in his own fashion. 

To these influences may well be added that 
of a group of cultivated foreigners, escaped 
from revolutions or prisons in Germany and 
Italy, and finding at last (from 1826 onward) a 
foothold in Harvard University. Such were 
Charles Follen, Charles Beck, Pietro Bachi; 
and to these must be added (1816) that delight- 
ful and sunny representative of Southern 
France, that living Gil Bias in hair-powder 
and pigtail, Francis Sales. To these was later 
joined (1847) the attractive and inspiring Louis 
Agassiz. There were also in Cambridge sev- 
eral private libraries which were, for their 
period, remarkable ; as that of Professor Con- 
vers Francis, rich in theology and in general 



1 8 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

literature; that of George Livermore, devoted 
especially to Bibles and Biblical literature; and 
that of Thomas Dowse, a leather-dresser in 
Cambridgeport, whose remarkable historical 
collections were bequeathed to the Massachu- 
setts Historical Society. At a time when the 
Harvard Library held but forty thousand 
books, these collections had a relative impor- 
tance which they would not now possess. 
They were enough to make Cambridge over- 
balance Boston, in its library opportunities, 
whereas for music and the plastic arts Cam- 
bridge had then as now to seek Boston ; and 
at that day would have been more liable 
even than Boston to the criticism made by 
a brilliant New York woman, upon the latter 
city, some thirty years ago, that it was a place 
where music, painting, and sculpture ** seemed 
to be regarded simply as branches of litera- 
ture"; in other words, people knew more of the 
biographies of artists than of their works. 

We boys knew the early traditions of Cam- 
bridge: of the famous hunt which brought in 
seventy-six wolves' heads as late as 1696, and the 
hunts which yielded many bears annually down 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 1 9 

to the time of the Revolution. We knew the 
tradition of Andrew Belcher's stately funeral 
in 171 7, when ninety-six pairs of mourning 
gloves were issued and fifty suits of mourning 
clothes were made for guests at the cost of the 
estate. We knew the place where two negroes 
were legally put to death in 1755 for the crime 
of petty treason in murdering their master, 
the one being hanged, the other burned to 
death. We knew that two of the regicides 
took refuge in Cambridge after the death of 
Charles I., and it was preserved in our memories 
by a curious oath " By Goffe-Whalley " then 
extant among Cambridge boys, but now van- 
ished. We knew the spot where stood the 
oak tree, on the north side of the common, 
where the Rev. John Wilson, first minister 
of Boston and a portly man, climbed the tree 
on Election Day, in 1637, and exhorted the 
people to vote for Governor Winthrop and not 
for Harry Vane. We read in a book by a 
Cambridge woman, Mrs. Hannah Winthrop, 
"the horrors of that midnight cry," as she calls 
it, when all the women and children of Cam- 
bridge were awakened by drums and bells on 



20 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

the night before the battle of Lexington ; when 
they were bidden to take refuge at Fresh Pond, 
away from the redcoats' line of march, and 
when, after the watchful night was over, they 
went on foot to Andover, passing the dead 
bodies that lay in what is now Arlington. 

It must be remembered that the Cambridge 
of sixty years ago was not merely that number 
of years nearer to the great Revolution which 
made us a nation, but was especially full of 
its associations. In the old First Church, 
where Dane Hall now stands, — the present 
church having been built in 1833, — the First 
Provincial Congress met, which was presided 
over by John Hancock, from October 17 to 
December 10, 1774. Here the Committee of 
Safety met, November 2, and here, on Febru- 
ary I, 1775, the Second Provincial Congress was 
convened, adjourning to Concord on the 17th. 
In Christ Church (built in 1 761) the company of 
Captain John Chester was quartered, after the 
battle of Lexington, and a bullet mark in the 
porch still recalls that period. The only mem- 
ber of the church who took the colonial side 
was appointed commissary general to the 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 21 

forces ; the rest fleeing to General Gage in 
Boston. All these things were traditional 
among Cambridge boys ; we knew the spot 
where the troops had been drawn up, opposite 
Dr. Holmes's " Old Manse," while President 
Langdon offered prayer, ere he dismissed them 
to their march toward Bunker Hill. We 
all knew the spot where Washington took 
command of the army; and the house (the 
Craigie House) where he dwelt. We played 
the battle of Bunker Hill on the grass-grown 
redoubts built during the siege of Boston. 
Only one of these is left, the three-gun bat- 
tery known as Fort Washington, but there 
was a finer one on Putnam Avenue, where 
greenhouses now stand. More elaborate than 
any were those around the ruins of the con- 
vent on Mount Benedict in Somerville ; they 
encircled the hill and could accommodate a 
regiment of schoolboys. Moreover, there still 
lingered one or two wounded veterans whom 
we eyed with reverence, chief of whom was 
Lowell's "Old Joe": — 

Old Joe is gone, who saw hot Percy goad 
His slow artillery up the Concord road — 



22 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

A tale which grew in wonder, year by year, 
As, every time he told it, Joe drew near 
To the main fight, till, faded and grown gray. 
The original scene to bolder tints gave way : 
Then Joe had heard the foe's scared double-quick 
Beat on stove-drum with one uncaptured stick. 
And, ere death came the lengthening tale to lop, 
Himself had fired and seen a redcoat drop. 
Had Joe lived long enough, that scrambling fight 
Had squared more nearly to his sense of right, 
And vanquished Percy, to complete the tale. 
Had hammered stone for life in Concord jail. 

There were still those in Cambridge who 
could recall the American Revolution and 
whose sons enacted the surrender of Corn- 
wallis at every country muster. The houses of 
Tory Row still stood in isolated dignity, some 
of them suspected, like the two Vassall Houses, 
of being connected by secret underground pas- 
sages which none could find, or else surrounded 
with quaint walls and fishponds and " topiary 
work" of carved yew trees, as at the Brattle 
House, now converted into the Social Union. 
I myself used to play among these trees with 
Margaret Fuller's younger brothers. Not far 
off was the house of the elder Professor Hedge, 
previously occupied by his father-in-law, Dr. 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 23 

Kneeland, who, being suspected as a Tory, had 
his house protected by red-coated sentries, for 
whom his little daughter imbibed such rever- 
ence that long after the British evacuation she 
never passed a deserted and battered sentry- 
box without dropping a courtesy in saluta- 
tion. 

In short, the British lion was to Cambridge 
boys of that day but a dethroned deity, who 
might again be restored should such boys relax 
for a moment their defiance to tyrants. Then 
there was *' the constant service of the antique 
world " in the direction of costume. Mr. Sales, 
the Franco-Spanish teacher, who lived till 1854, 
had cue and hair powder; Dr. Popkin, who 
died in 1852, wore the last of the cocked hats, 
which, with his umbrella, is carefully preserved 
in the Cambridge Public Library. This imple- 
ment was one of the three eminent umbrellas 
which dignified the university town ; vast and 
heavy structures, equally hard to spread or 
furl ; the second belonged to William Jennison, 
tax-collector, and the other to Professor Hedge, 
this being commemorated in Holmes's letters 
as held by the hands of his son Dunham, " An 



24 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

old-fashioned republican-looking one, such as 
Dunham used to carry his aunt home with."^ 

These and many other traditions were a part 
of the education of Cambridge boys three- 
quarters of a century ago ; on such traditions 
Holmes and Lowell were nurtured, and it was 
into an atmosphere full of such that Longfellow 
entered when he removed to Cambridge. It 
may be called provincial, certainly, but it was 
such a provincialism as that of the heronry of 
which we were proud, in the deep swamps 
called the Fresh Pond marshes, where succes- 
sive broods of birds were hatched, varying in 
length of wing or power of flight, but agreeing 
in this, that all flew from it at morning and 
winged their way back to it as evening drew on. 

Add to all this that Cambridge, like other 
college towns in America, was a place of simple 
habits, where wealth counted for little and intel- 
lect for a great deal; indeed, wealth counts 
for comparatively little in Cambridge to this 
day. When a boy, hearing complaint made of 
the low salaries paid to all professors, — then 
about ^looo, — I asked why they remained in 

^ Holmes's "Life and Letters," L p. 127. 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 25 

office, and was told by my elder brother that 
these instructors were considered to be partly 
paid in honor — this being certainly a high les- 
son to impress on schoolboys. 

It must finally be remembered that an essen- 
tial part of the atmosphere of Old Cambridge 
was what may be called the habit of precocity 
on the intellectual side. The period described 
was one of infant schools, — institutions quite 
unlike the modern kindergarten, — and the forc- 
ing process was applied very early, so as insen- 
sibly to modify us all. Margaret Fuller began 
to study Latin at the age of six, and recited to 
her father after he had come back from his law- 
yer's office, being often kept up for the purpose 
until late in the evening. The Rev. Dr. Hedge, 
afterwards so intimately associated with her, as- 
sured me that there was nothing remarkable 
about this process of forcing except that it was 
applied to a girl; all the professors' sons, he 
said, were educated in the same way. He him- 
self was fitted for college at eleven, and had 
read at least half of the whole body of Latin 
literature before that time. I have given else- 
where a letter I once received from a little girl 



26 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

of my acquaintance, the daughter of a professor, 
a letter written by her own hand, congratulat- 
ing me on being six years old and boasting 
that she should be four in three months. When 
we read in Lowell's letters of his poring over 
French stories at seven and of his mother's giv- 
ing him the three volumes of Scott's " Tales of 
a Grandfather " at nine, we must bear in mind 
this habitual precocity of the period. That it 
was physically disastrous to Margaret Fuller 
we know from her own statements; but that 
it did any visible injury to the Cambridge men 
of her generation I am unable to say. Certain 
it is that Holmes, Lowell, Story, and Hedge re- 
tained into age — except for the last few years 
of the latter's life — a wonderful share of the 
vivacity and freshness of youth — the very 
qualities which precocious training is thought 
by many to impair. 

The people among whom the Cambridge 
authors were born or lived were thus a race of 
simple, well-meaning, studious, and even culti- 
vated persons, having the advantages and limi- 
tations of a college town, not yet a university 
city. When we judge the Cambridge academic 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 2/ 

life of that day by the present standard of an 
English university, we of course commit great 
injustice; we can only compare it with the cor- 
responding English conditions of the same 
period ; and these had, as the accomplished 
Edward Everett, fresh from German universi- 
ties, had written, absolutely no advantage over 
the American Cambridge. He wrote to my 
father from Oxford (June 6, 1818): ** There is 
more teaching and more learning in our Ameri- 
can Cambridge than there is in both the Eng- 
lish universities together, tho' between them 
they have four times our number of students." ^ 
Yet he had, with Cogswell and Ticknor, writ- 
ten letter after letter to show the immeasurable 
superiority of Gottingen to the little American 
institution ; and his low estimate of the English 
universities as they were in 181 8 is confirmed 
by those who teach in them to-day. 

It is fair to say that, provincial as the Cam- 
bridge of sixty years ago may have been, it 
offered at least a somewhat refined provincial- 
ism, with the good manners and respectable 
attainments prevaiHng at that time. Nothing is 

1 Harvard Graduates' Magazine, September, 1897, P* ^^* 



28 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

more curious than the impression held by some 
of Lowell's English friends — even, it is said, 
that most intimate friend to whom his letters 
are dedicated by Mr. Norton — that the *' Hosea 
Biglow " dialect was that of Lowell's father, fam- 
ily, and personal circle. All who know anything 
of the period know that the speech of educated 
families in New England at that time resembled 
essentially — perhaps more closely than now 
— the dialect of corresponding families in Eng- 
land. There had been less time than now for 
differences of climate and social habit to de- 
velop different intonations and pronunciations. 
The speech of Hosea Biglow was the speech, on 
the other hand, not of peasants, — for there was 
no such class, — but of New England farmers, 
and consequently of their sons who came to the 
neighborhood of cities to do farmwork and get 
on in life. The Irish invasion had then scarcely 
begun, and the " hired man " of the Cambridge 
household was usually a country boy — half ser- 
vant and half equal — who took care of the horse 
and did the chores. As a rule, he was little edu- 
cated, — for the modern public school system 
was hardly inaugurated, — but he had plenty 



OLD CAMBRIDGE ^9 

of sense and energy ; and his descendants now 
often occupy high social positions, very Hkely 
employing in some capacity the descendants of 
those who paid wages to their progenitors. 
Even at that time, the " hired men " held their 
own at the town meeting and in the muster 
field ; and President Quincy, the dignified head 
of the college, was only major in the militia 
regiment of which his man-servant was colonel. 
It was at this period and under these conditions 
that the " Biglow Papers " were written. The 
dialect of Lowell's father and his mates, on 
the other hand, was only too scholastic and 
academic ; he who doubts this has merely to 
consult the early volumes of the North Ameri- 
can Review. 

It was perhaps fortunate, on the whole, as 
being an essential part of the broader training 
of Cambridge authors, that the population and 
traditions of the town were not wholly Puritanic, 
or rather that it included some representative of 
that gypsy-like element which has here and there 
cropped out, in a repressed minority, — a sort of 
submerged stratum, — in New England ever since 
the days of Morton of Merry Mount. It has 



30 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

found but two recognized autobiographers, — 
Stephen Burroughs and Henry Tufts; but it 
made itself manifest on every Commencement 
Day at Cambridge and at every " Cornwallis " 
— a form of military muster — on Waltham 
Plain. John Holmes, who always got closer 
to the heart of the community than any one 
else, thus depicted some of its elements in 
Cambridge through a magazine called The 
Writer : — 

" Old Cambridge in Mr. Lowell's youth was 
little more than a village; indeed, the expres- 
sion, * down to the village,' was in use. The old 
Puritan industry and thrift prevailed ; but there 
were those who were not content with life in 
water colors, but demanded a stronger liquid to 
produce the desired tints, and chose the path of 
pleasure rather than that of thrift. They did 
some desultory work, in deference to necessity, 
but their best efforts were given to the small 
game on the marshes. The exertion necessary 
in this pursuit, they could endure, it being free 
from any taint of regular industry. But angling, 
sedentary and contemplative, was their prefer- 
ence. To throw the line into the dark eddies 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 3 1 

by the Brighton Bridge, and at ease to await 
the fish who was to outrun the largest dimen- 
sions offered by tradition, was complete hap- 
piness. Mr, Lowell viewed these exceptional 
beings with the eye of a humorist, rather 
than of the moralist. As a spectator, he 
appreciated the irregular light which they 
threw on the monotonous path of steady in- 
dustry." 

There is abundant evidence in Lowell's letters 
and in his printed works of his humorous enjoy- 
ment of this under-side of human nature. It 
was after his final return from England that he 
had an appeal, on the day before one Fourth of 
July, from a broken-down companion of his boy- 
hood who had led a somewhat questionable life, 
to go down to East Cambridge jail and release 
another similar worthy, also a playmate, that he 
might at least spend Independence Day in free- 
dom. Lowell went promptly and paid the fine, 
which was very likely assessed over again, and 
for adequate cause, within forty-eight hours. 
The element of sailor vagrancy, too, was then 
far more prominent than now. The East India 
trade was still a lingering Boston enterprise. 



32 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

Cambridge boys were still sent to sea as a cure 
for naughtiness, or later as supercargoes, this 
being a mark of confidence. Groups of sailors 
sometimes strayed through Cambridge, and 
there were aromatic smells among the Boston 
wharves. Lowell in particular had a naval 
uncle, and he wrote of what had been told 
from childhood v/hen he said in " The Growth 
of the Legend " : — 

The sailors' night watches are thrilled to the core 
With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor. 

In two respects the group of Cambridge 
authors had gained from their restricted life 
certain qualities which some might call bourgeois, 
and many others admirable. They were all 
honest men pecuniarily ; they habitually paid 
their debts and lived within their means. 
Neither in Holmes nor Lowell nor in Long- 
fellow was there anything of that quality of thrif t- 
lessness so dear to lovers of the picturesque, 
but so exasperating to market-men and other 
base creatures. If the Cambridge men were not 
" great wits," they were not " to madness near 
allied" in this respect, nor did they drive cred- 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 33 

itors to madness. Longfellow regards with 
amused interest the discovery that N. P. Willis, 
in 1840, had earned by his pen annually ten 
thousand dollars, while Longfellow himself says, 
" I wish I had made ten hundred ; " but it did 
not inspire him with the wish to do Willis's work 
of gossip, only with a desire to keep his own 
method. Lowell was never rich, nor was 
Holmes, but they lived within their means. 
Even Longfellow's salary in 1834 was but 
fifteen hundred dollars, although in later life 
his income became ample. There was nothing 
Pharisaical in this moderation, nor did either of 
these poets deal harshly with persons of the 
Harold Skimpole race who hovered around 
them, as about all those who have incurred the 
imputation of success in their trade, whatever 
it be. Any lack of interest pertaining to 
the names of Cambridge bards for this reason 
must be endured ; there have been many per- 
sons in our literature to whom no such despic- 
able habits of abstinence belonged, and who 
found a loftier philosophy in Pistol's *' Base is 
the slave that pays." 

And the other point which seems noticeable 

D 



34 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

is that while they were ready to accept fame 
and prosperity as they came, they did not 
copy the tricks of poUticians, pulling their 
own wires, lauding their own achievements, 
asking puffs from others, and exhibiting them- 
selves in attitudes. There was also in their 
immediate circle the heartiest mutual regard 
and not a trace of jealousy. They may have 
been called a Mutual Admiration Society, but 
this was incomparably better than to belong 
to one of those societies for Mutual Defamation 
which literary history has much oftener seen. 
Even Concord, in spite of its soothing name, 
did not always exhibit among its literary men 
that relation of unbroken harmony which 
marked the three most eminent of those here 
classed as Cambridge authors. It is well 
known that Emerson distrusted the sombre 
tone of Hawthorne's writings and advised 
young people not to read them ; and that 
Judge Hoar, Emerson's inseparable friend, 
could conceive of no reason why any one 
should wish to see Thoreau's Journals pub- 
lished. Among the Knickerbocker circles in 
New York it seems to have been still worse. 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 35 

Cooper the novelist, says Parke Godwin, always 
brought "3. breeze of quarrel with him." Cooper 
wrote thus to Rufus W. Griswold (August 7, 
1842): "A published eulogy of myself from 
Irving's pen could not change my opinion of his 
career. . . . Cuvier has the same faults as 
Irving, and so had Scott. They were all 
meannesses, and I confess I can sooner par- 
don crimes, if they are manly ones. I have 
never had any quarrel with Mr. Irving, and 
give him full credit as a writer. Still I be- 
lieve him to be below the ordinary level, in 
moral qualities, instead of being above them, 
as he is cried up to be." He adds : " Bryant 
is worth forty Irvings in every point of view, 
but he runs a little into the seemly (.?) 
school." ^ Whipple writes to Griswold six 
years later : " I have no patience with the 
New York literati. They are all the time 
quarrelling with each other. Why not kiss 
and be friends .? " ^ No such letter could 
ever have been written about the three most 
eminent Cambridge authors, nor could any- 

1 " Letters of R. W. Griswold," pp. 144, 145. 

2 Ii>zd., p. 233. 



36 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

thing be more simple, delightful, and free from 
clouds than the whole intercourse between 
Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow, To those 
outside their own circle, and especially to 
Margaret Fuller, this cordiality did not always 
extend, but it is to be noted that as she perma- 
nently removed from Cambridge, her birthplace, 
in 1833, before Lowell had even entered col- 
lege and before Longfellow had become a 
Harvard professor, she formed no part of the 
local group. The conservative Holmes, who 
had been a schoolmate of hers, rather sympa- 
thized with Lowell's attack upon her;^ but 
when she criticised Longfellow in the New 
York Tribune, the latter only mentions it in 
his journal as '* what might be called a bilious 
attack," and on hearing the news of her death 
he writes : " What a calamity ! A singular 
woman for New England to produce ; original 
and somewhat self-willed, but full of talent and 
full of work. A tragic end to a somewhat 
troubled and romantic life." It would indeed 
have been difficult, perhaps, for mutual jealousy 

1 Lowell's "Letters," II. pp. 26, 173. Compare Holmes's 
"Life and Letters," II. p. 108. 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 37 

or envy to exist in any literary circle of which 
Longfellow was the centre ; and the centre of 
the Cambridge circle, so far as the little town 
itself was concerned, he surely was. 

Professor Norton has left on record the per- 
fect frankness with which Lowell and himself 
criticised the final revision of Longfellow's 
Dante, "with a freedom that was made perfect" 
by the absolute modesty of the author.^ As 
between Holmes and Lowell, those who think 
that mutual admiration went too far, and be- 
came flattery, would do well to read and digest 
the letters of Holmes to Lowell as published 
in the "Life and Letters "^ of the former, 
and see how utterly frank was their intercourse 
from the beginning, and how keenly Holmes 
recognized, for instance, the weak points not 
merely of the " Fable for Critics," but of the 
"Vision of Sir Launfal." No contemporary 
critic, perhaps, insisted with such fearless 
justice on the incongruities which form the very 
basis of that otherwise charming work — "the 
picture part of the poem" being "Yankee in its 

1 Longfellow's " Life," by his brother, II. p. 429. 

2 Holmes's *' Life and Letters," II. pp. 107, 138. 



38 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

effect," as Holmes says, with the dandeUon and 
the Baltimore oriole '' in the tableaux of the old 
feudal castle." In even the description of June 
he finds some of these discords and gives abso- 
lute praise only to the description of the brook. 
His criticism on the measure of the poem is 
only the natural revolt of what he calls the " old 
square-toed heroic" against the ** rattlety-bang 
sort of verse " which came in with Coleridge's 
**Christabel." All this was, however, written in 
1849, and certainly no finer " appreciation " — in 
the current phrase — of the man Lowell was ever 
penned than that which Holmes wrote in 1868 : 
" I cannot help, however, saying how much I am 
impressed by the lusty manhood of your nature 
as shown in the heroic vigor of your verse ; by 
the reach and compass of your thought ; by the 
affluence, the felicity, and the subtilty of your 
illustrations, which weave with the thoughts 
they belong to as golden threads through the 
tissue of which they form part; and perhaps 
most of all by that Jmmanity in its larger sense, 
which belongs to you beyond any of those with 
whom your name is often joined. While I have 
been reading these grave and noble poems I 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 39 

have forgotten that you were a wit and a humor- 
ist, — that you were a critic and an essayist, to 
say nothing of your being a scholar such as we 
breed, if at all, only as the phoenix is bred." ^ 

Such was the generosity of tone, such the 
frankness of intercourse, that prevailed in the 
little circle of Cambridge authors half a century 
ago. 

1 Holmes's " Life and Letters," IL p. ill. 



II 

OLD CAMBRIDGE IN THREE 
LITERARY EPOCHS 



II 

OLD CAMBRIDGE IN THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 

The literary epochs of New England may be 
said to have been three : the first issue of the 
North American Review (1815), that of the Dial 
(1840), and that of the Atlafttic Monthly (1857). 
During each of these epochs a peculiarly im- 
portant part was taken by Cambridge men. 

I. The North American Review 

The North American Review, though pre- 
ceded in Boston by the short-lived Massachusetts 
Magazine and the Monthly Anthology, yet 
achieved an influence and a prominence which 
these did not reach, and is still issued, though in 
another city and in another form. Of the " An- 
thology Club" of Boston, Josiah Quincy said — 
knowing intimately most of the members : — 
" Its labors may be considered as a true revi- 
val of polite learning in this country, after that 
43 



44 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

decay and neglect which resulted from the dis- 
tractions of the Revolutionary War, and as 
forming an epoch in the intellectual history of 
the United States." This epoch may, however, 
be better indicated by the foundation of the 
North American Review ^ which immediately 
followed. This periodical, during far the larger 
part of its early career, was under the editorship 
of Cambridge men. After the first editor, Will- 
iam Tudor, there came a long line of Cambridge 
successors — Willard Phillips, Edward Tyrrel 
Channing, Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, John 
Gorham Palfrey, Francis Bowen, and, after some 
interval, James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot 
Norton. The list of chief contributors to the 
first forty volumes of the Review, as appears 
from the Index published in 1878, would include, 
in addition to those already given, C. C. Felton, 
George Bancroft, H. W. Longfellow, and the 
elder Norton — all Harvard instructors. Its 
connection with Cambridge was therefore well 
defined and unquestionable. 

Judge Story, then head of the Harvard Law 
School, who had for many years a higher 
foreign reputation than any other American 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 45 

author, thus wrote in 1 8 19 to Sir William Scott: 
" So great is the call for talents of all sorts in 
the active use of professional and other busi- 
ness in America, that few of our ablest men 
have leisure to devote exclusively to literature 
or the fine arts, or to composition on abstract 
science. This obvious reason . . . will explain 
why we have few professional authors and those 
not among our ablest men." He then speaks 
of a "review published in Boston," and says: 
" The review is edited by gentlemen young in 
life, engaged in active business, and who have 
scarcely a moment of leisure to devote to these 
pursuits. The latter, too, is voluntary and 
without profit to themselves." ^ This referred 
plainly to the NortJi American Review. 

The articles which appeared in this Review 
had a wide influence, in their day, on both 
political and literary opinion. They were 
written, as a rule, in what may be called the 
Southey style, which then predominated in the 
London quarterlies — an orderly and clear-cut 
style, not wanting in vigor, but essentially 
academic. The early articles, if they brought 

1 Story's " Life and Letters," I. p. 32. 



46 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

little profit to their authors, brought some- 
times disaster. Bowen, for instance, whose 
self-willed and somewhat disputative tempera- 
ment made him many enemies, lost the Pro- 
fessorship of American History in Harvard 
University through a series of attacks on the 
Hungarian revolutionists for whom Kossuth 
had aroused much interest in this country. 
Bowen's views were strongly contested by a 
man of uncommon ability, Robert Carter, also of 
Cambridge, who wrote a series of papers in the 
Bosto7i Atlas (1850) in defence of Kossuth and 
his party ; and these papers, being reprinted in 
a pamphlet, were said to have caused the refusal 
of the Board of Overseers to confirm Bowen's 
nomination as Professor of History. Three 
years later, however, he was appointed Alford 
Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philoso- 
phy, and Civil Polity, a position which he held 
until his death. He was a man of immense 
reading, keen mind, and was not without those 
qualities which Lord Byron thought essential to 
an historian, — wrath and partiality. For him 
alone Lowell made an essential change in his 
" Fable for Critics," leaving out in the revised 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 4/ 

edition a pungent delineation of Professor 
Bowen. This Lowell did on becoming him- 
self a Harvard professor ; and if he had done 
the same, after Margaret Fuller's tragic death, 
with his personal attack on her, he would have 
averted much criticism on himself. 

Robert Carter, who thus defeated Bowen 
and was afterwards intimately associated with 
Lowell in both literature and life, was one of 
those gifted eccentrics who gravitated to Cam- 
bridge in earher days, perhaps more freely than 
now. He had known extreme poverty, and 
used to tell the story of his mother and himself 
walking the streets of a city in central New 
York and spending their last half-dollar on a 
copy of Spenser's " Faerie Queene," instead of 
a dinner. He was a man of wide reading, great 
memory, and great inventive power ; his favorite 
work in embryo being a tale which was to 
occupy twelve volumes each as large as Sue's 
''Wandering Jew," then widely read. Two of 
these volumes were to contain an incidental 
summary of the history of the world, told by a 
heavenly spirit to a man wandering among the 
Mountains of the Moon in Africa. He came 



48 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

to Cambridge under Lowell's patronage and 
secured a place in the post-office at a salary of 
two hundred dollars, on which modest income 
he married a maiden as poor as himself, who 
brought him as a dowry two eagles, — formidable 
pets, — whose butcher's bills made great inroads 
on his pay. With all these peculiarities he was 
a capital journalist and had much organizing 
power, the main work of bringing into existence 
the Free Soil (afterward Republican) party 
falling upon him. He made, however, no per- 
manent contribution to literature except in a 
little book so excellently done that it should 
prove a classic, — *' A Summer Cruise on the 
Coast of New England." 

One of the controlling influences in the North 
American, and in all the Cambridge life of 
that period, was a man whose prominence is 
now merged in that of a yet more accomplished 
and eminent son. This was Professor Andrews 
Norton, admirably described by George Ripley, 
— the founder of Brook Farm, — who had 
nevertheless had with him a controversy so 
vehement that it would have annihilated the 
mutual appreciation of lesser men. Ripley's 
characterization is as follows : — 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 49 

" Mr. Norton may be said to have formed 
a connecting link between the past and the 
future in American literary cultivation. He 
appeared at the moment when the scholastic 
attainments since the period of the Revolu- 
tion were about to ripen into a more generous 
development. In early life he was far in 
advance of most of his contemporaries in 
sound and exact learning, and in what was 
then deemed an excessive freedom of specu- 
lation. He was connected with Harvard, first 
as tutor, then as librarian, and afterward as 
Professor of Sacred Literature. In each of 
these offices his influence was marked and 
salutary. His thorough scholarship served to 
give form and substance to the literary en- 
thusiasm which at that time prevailed in 
Cambridge. His refined and exquisite taste 
cast an air of purity and elegance around the 
spirit of the place. His habits were as 'se- 
vere as those of a mediaeval monk. His love 
of literature was a passion. The predomi- 
nant qualities of his mind were clearness of 
perception, rigidity of judgment, accuracy of 
expression, and a chaste imagination. His 



50 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

peculiar sphere was that of theology and crit- 
icism, but no department of elegant letters 
was foreign to his tastes. Every scholar in 
Cambridge received an inspiring impulse from 
his example. His sympathies were not easily 
won, nor was he lavish in the expression of 
even favorable judgments. He was free, per- 
haps, from what may be called moral suspi- 
cion, but he certainly often evinced an excess 
of intellectual caution. A man of stainless 
purity of purpose, of high integrity of life, 
with a profound sense of religion, and severe 
simplicity of manners, his example was a 
perpetual rebuke to the conceitedness of learn- 
ing, the vanity of youthful scholarship, and 
the habit of 'vain and shallow thought.* His 
influence is deeply stamped on the literature 
of Harvard." 

Side by side with the North American 
Review grew up another periodical which, 
though denominational, was a sort of adjunct 
to it, — the Christian Examiner, established 
in 1824. It was first edited by Rev. John G. 
Palfrey, D.D., of Cambridge, and afterwards 
for a long time by the Rev. William Ware 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 5 1 

of Cambridge, better known by his historical 

romances "Zenobia" and *' Probus." These 

• 

tales had l-ong a high reputation, and reprints of 
them still appear in England. The Christian 
Examiner existed for forty-five years, and al- 
though for many years it paid nothing to 
contributors, it yet rendered distinct literary 
service, whatever may be thought of its the- 
ology. Nor must be forgotten another im- 
portant annual publication always edited in 
Cambridge, — The American Almanac. Its 
main founder was another of those eccentric 
characters of whom the university town was 
then prolific. Among the various academic 
guests who used to gather in my mother's 
hospitable parlor on Sunday evenings, no fig- 
ure is more vivid in my memory than one 
whom Lowell in his " Fireside Travels " has 
omitted to sketch. This was Dr. Joseph E. Wor- 
cester, whose " Elements of History, Ancient 
and Modern," I had faithfully studied at school; 
and who was wont to sit silent, literally by 
the hour, a slumbering volcano of facts and 
statistics, while others talked. He was tall, 
stiff, gentle, and benignant, wearing blue spec- 



52 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

tacles, and with his head as it were ingulfed in 
the high coat collar of other days. He rocked 
to and fro, placidly listening to what was 
said, and might perhaps have been suspected 
of a gentle slumber, when the casual mention 
of some city in the West, then dimly known, 
would rouse him to action. He would then 
cease rocking, would lean forward, and say in 
his peaceful voice : " Chillicothe ? What is the 
present population of Chillicothe.'*" or, "Co- 
lumbus ? What is the population of Colum- 
bus ? " and then, putting away the item in some 
appropriate pigeon-hole of his vast memory, 
would relapse into his rocking-chair once 
more. These various periodicals, with their 
editors, gave to Cambridge the constant atti- 
tude of dawning knowledge, of incipient liter- 
ature, which, indeed, properly belongs to a 
college town. It is to be observed that all 
new university centres, as Baltimore or Chi- 
cago, thus now signalize their arrival through 
the creation of new periodicals by the dozen. 
The North American Review existed at a 
time when the " Four Reviews," as they were 
called, were still the foundation of all American 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 53 

thought, and when sets of the '' Modern British 
Essayists" had taken the place in young men's 
libraries of the " British Essayists " of Addi- 
son's period. The result was a well-bred, 
clearly written, somewhat prosaic style com- 
mon to both nations, but practically brought to 
an end by Carlyle with his impetuous vigor and 
by what Holmes called "the Macaulay-fiowers " 
of literature. These influences in England, with 
the rise of Emerson and Parker in America, 
brought a distinct change, and Lowell emi- 
nently contributed his share when Professor 
Bowen, editing the North American^ complained 
of his articles as being **too brilliant." Since 
that day authors have been allowed to be as brill- 
iant as they can, in all periodicals, although 
they have not uniformly availed themselves of 
this privilege. 

2. The Dial 

Whatever may be said, in the light of chang- 
ing schools of philosophy, as to the more or less 
shadowy opinions which lay behind the move- 
ment called Transcendentalism, there can be no 
doubt that, so far as literature went, it was the 



54 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

beginning of a new era for America. In the 
very first number of the Dial, upon its first 
page Emerson announced it as its primary aim 
" to make new demands on literature " ; and 
it is worth noticing that this original movement 
had its roots at several different points in Old 
Cambridge. 

The plan of a new periodical had been dis- 
cussed between Hedge and Margaret Fuller — 
both natives of Cambridge — as early as March 5, 
1835, the latter writing, "Your periodical plan 
charms me." In the autumn of 1836, the bi- 
centennial of Harvard University was held, 
and four young clergymen — Emerson, Hedge, 
Ripley, and Putnam — had an almost casual 
meeting at Willard's Hotel, now the electric 
railway station at Harvard Square in Cam- 
bridge; where began a series of consultations, 
afterwards adjourned to Boston and to Con- 
cord, culminating in a club called variously 
the Symposium Club, the Transcendental Club, 
and the Hedge Club, — the latter name because 
its meetings were timed to suit the occasional 
visit of Hedge, then settled in Bangor, Maine. 
At a meeting of this club on September 18, 1839, 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 55 

Mr. Alcott records in his memoranda that Mar- 
garet Fuller "gave her views of the proposed 
*Dial,' which she afterwards edited." This is 
the first record, so far as I know, of the precise 
name of the periodical, this being apparently 
borrowed from a manuscript bearing the same 
name and composed by Mr. Alcott.^ 

Meanwhile, to accentuate the literary ten- 
dency of the new movement in a yet more marked 
way, a young Harvard graduate, Robert Bartlett 
of Plymouth, then Latin tutor at the University, 
who was an occasional member or visitor of 
the Symposium Club, had taken for his Master 
of Arts oration in 1839 ^^is daring theme, "No 
good possible but shall one day be real," and 
had thus boldly turned his searchlight upon 
the position and prospects of American litera- 
ture : — 

"When Horace was affecting to make him- 
self a Greek poet, the genius of his country, the 
shade of immortal Romulus, stood over him, 
post vtedimn noctern visits quum somnia vera^ 
and forbade the perversion. ... Is everything 
so sterile and pygmy here in New England, that 

1 Alcott's MS. Diary, XIV. 79. 



56 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

we must all, writers and readers, be forever 
replenishing ourselves with the mighty wonders 
of the Old World ? Is not the history of this 
people transcendent in the chronicles of the 
world for pure, homogeneous sublimity and 
beauty and richness ? Go down some ages of 
ages from this day, compress the years from 
the landing of the Pilgrims to the death of 
Washington into the same span as the first two 
centuries of Athens now fill in our memories. 
Will men then come hither from all regions of the 
globe — will the tomb of Washington, the rock 
of the Puritans, then become classic to the world ? 
will these spots and relics here give them inspi- 
ration, the theme, the image of the poet and 
orator and sculptor, and be the ground of splen- 
did mythologies ? . . . We do not express the 
men and the miracles of our history in our social 
action, and correspondingly, ay, and by conse- 
quence, we do not outwrite them in poetry or 
art. We are looking abroad and back after a 
literature. Let us come and live, and know in 
living a high philosophy and faith ; so shall 
we find now, here, the elements, and in our own 
good souls the fire. Of every storied bay and 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 57 

cliff and plain, we will make something infinitely 

nobler than Salamis or Marathon. This pale 

Massachusetts sky, this sandy soil and raw wind, 

all shall nurture us : — 

" O Nature, less is all of thine, 
Than are thy borrowings from our human breast. 

" Rich skies, fair fields, shall come to us, suf- 
fused with the immortal hues of spirit, of beau- 
teous act and thought. Unlike all the world 
before us, our own age and land shall be classic 
to ourselves." 

This was the attitude of mind which the new 
periodical was to represent; but Alcott writes 
of its prospects in his diary (November i, 1839): 
" Half a dozen men exhaust our list of contribu- 
tors ; Emerson, Hedge, Miss Fuller, Ripley, 
[W. H.] Channing, Dwight, [J. F.] Clarke, are 
our dependence." It is to be noticed that, of this 
club of seven, Hedge and Miss Fuller were Cam- 
bridge bom ; Emerson and Channing had resided 
in Cambridge with their parents ; while all but 
Miss Fuller were Harvard graduates. This cer- 
tainly estabUshed at the outset a very close con- 
nection between the new literary movement and 
Old Cambridge; and among its later writers 



58 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

Lowell, Cranch, and Miss S. S. Jacobs were 
residents of Cambridge, while others, as Parker, 
Dwight, Thoreau, and Ellery Channing had 
spent more or less time at the University. 

Sarah Margaret Fuller, afterward Countess 
of Ossoli, was quite as distinctly as either 
Holmes or Lowell the product of Cambridge ; 
whose academic influences, though applied 
indirectly, were what trained her mind, impaired 
her health, and brought out certain hereditary 
qualities which were not altogether attractive. 
She left a fragment of autobiographical romance 
in which she vividly describes the horrors of 
the intellectual forcing process to which she had 
been subjected, and though this sketch, as her 
brother suggests, must not be taken too literally, 
and though it was only, as has since been 
pointed out, what was applied to all the pro- 
fessors' children, yet it would now be regarded 
as extreme and objectionable. When she was 
fifteen and had returned from a short experi- 
ence of boarding-school, her actual mode of 
life was as follows : she rose before five in 
summer, walked an hour, practised an hour 
on the piano, breakfasted at seven, read Sis- 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 59 

mondi's " European Literature " in French till 
eight, then Brown's " Philosophy " till half-past 
nine, then went to school for Greek at twelve, 
then practised again till dinner. After the early 
dinner she read two hours in ItaHan, then 
walked or rode ; and in the evening played, 
sang, and retired at eleven to write in her 
diary. All this was at the time of year when 
young girls are now entering upon their 
summer vacation or speeding over hill and 
vale on their bicycles. This was the period 
when she went to school with Dr. Holmes 
and overwhelmed him by beginning her first 
essay with the sentence, ** It is a trite re- 
mark," whereas he confesses that at that time 
he did not even know the meaning of the 
word triU. All this early Cambridge training, 
if it did not make her a systematic thinker, 
made her an inexhaustible reader and a patient 
editor. Her friend, Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge, 
who had been five years in Germany, had taken 
his Harvard degree, and had studied theology 
in the Cambridge Divinity School, was un- 
doubtedly the best-trained and most methodical 
of the early Transcendentalists, and contributed 



6o OLD CAMBRIDGE 

to the management of the Dial whatever of 
steadfastness it had. He, like his friend Mar- 
garet, had drunk deeply at the newly opened 
well of German literature, and he was one of the 
best translators of that language, so that they 
were both ready and willing to enrich American 
letters from this source. He also introduced 
her to Emerson, who had then removed from 
Cambridge to Concord, and the editorship of 
the Dial was always limited to these three. 
The magazine was, therefore, always kept sub- 
stantially in Cambridge hands. 

The three papers, by these several editors, 
which gave the literary keynote to the new 
periodical, were the opening address, '* The 
Editors to the Reader," by Emerson, "An 
Essay on Critics," by Margaret Fuller, — both 
these being in the first number, — and an essay 
in the second number called "The Art of Life; 
the Scholar's Calling," by Hedge. The latter 
has passages distinctly bearing on our literary 
future as seen from 1840: — 

" Hitherto our literature has been but an 
echo of other voices and climes. Generally, 
in the history of nations, song has preceded 



THREE LITERARY EtOCHS 6 1 

science, and the feeling of a people has been 
sooner developed than its understanding. With 
us this order has been reversed. The national 
understanding is fully ripe, but the feeling, the 
imagination of the people, has found as yet no 
adequate expression. We have our men of 
science, our Franklins, our Bowditches, our 
Cleavelands; we have our orators, our states- 
men ; but the American poet, the American 
thinker, is yet to come. A deeper culture must 
lay the foundation for him who shall worthily 
represent the genius and utter the life of this 
continent. A severer discipline must prepare 
the way for our Dantes, our Shakespeares, our 
Miltons. * He who would write an epic,' said 
one of these, ' must make his life an epic' 
This touches our infirmity. We have no prac- 
tical poets, — no epic lives. Let us but have 
sincere livers, earnest, whole-hearted, heroic 
men, and we shall not want for writers and for 
literary fame. Then shall we see springing up, 
in every part of these Republics, a literature 
such as the ages have not known, — a literature 
commensurate with our idea, vast as our destiny, 
and varied as our theme." 



62 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

This was, it must be seen, a distinct reaf- 
firmation of the position previously taken by 
Robert Bartlett and shows how definite and 
earnest, on the literary side at least, was the 
aim of the Transcendentalists. In tempera- 
ment, no doubt, they differed enormously — 
Alcott and Parker, for instance, representing 
almost the opposite extremes of the ideal and 
practical ; but so far as literature was con- 
cerned their aim was one. All wished to 
create such a literature, to hold it to a high 
standard and to make it representative of the 
new world in which it was born. Literature 
had in its plans a position which had been 
assigned to it in no previous outburst of the 
American mind. To these men and women, 
most of the New York Knickerbocker school 
probably appeared as triflers, and the North 
American contributors as merely academic. 
They reached doubtless but a limited audi- 
ence, as do most reformers ; they committed 
fantastic follies, but so do the saints every- 
where. As a result they distinctly influenced 
the national literature ; much, for instance, of 
the power now attributed to Emerson being 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 6$ 

really the unconscious result of the total move- 
ment. Fame is very chary of personal rights ; 
it is difficult to erect a new altar. Everything 
tends to concentrate on a single name, and just 
as for years every good thing said in Boston was 
ultimately attributed to Holmes or Motley or 
Tom Appleton, so one sees to this day phrases 
credited to Emerson which really belonged to 
Alcott or Parker or Hedge. The late John S. 
Dwight was perhaps more boldly robbed and 
complimented than any other of his circle ; 
since his poem called *' Rest," — 

Sweet is the pleasure 

Itself cannot spoil; 
Is not true leisure 

One with true toil? — 

still appears periodically as an occasional resur- 
rection in the newspapers, but always as a trans- 
lation from some supposed poem of Goethe. 

Dwight was very probably a divinity stu- 
dent at Cambridge when this poem was 
composed, he having left that institution in 
1836; and enough has at any rate been writ- 
ten to show that Cambridge was in many 
respects the seed-ground of that intellectual 



64 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

impulse which was harvested later at the 
house of Emerson in Concord, whither he 
removed in 1834, having left Cambridge in 
1826. It is to be observed also that, of the 
later writers in the Dial^ Christopher Pearce 
Cranch, who wrote much in it, was in his later 
life a resident of Cambridge ; that Lowell con- 
tributed several sonnets to the second volume; 
that William Henry Channing, who wrote the 
serial " Ernest the Seeker," from time to time 
resided in Cambridge, where his mother dwelt 
permanently, being much of the time an occu- 
pant of the house now known as Fay House and 
the headquarters of Radcliffe College. It is also 
to be noticed that his cousin, William Ellery 
Channing, furnished for the last volume of the 
Dial a series of papers called " Youth of the 
Poet and the Painter," the scene of which was 
in part laid at Harvard College. It will thus 
be seen at what a variety of points the Dial 
touched Old Cambridge. 

3. The Atlantic Monthly 

I know of no book or essay in which the 
history of the Atlantic Monthly is carried far 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 65 

enough back. Even the best of these narra- 
tives, that of Mr. J. T. Trowbridge in the 
Atlantic Monthly for January, 1895, entitled 
"The Author of Quabbin," speaks as if the 
Atlantic Monthly had no existence, even pro- 
spectively, before 1857, whereas it was really 
planned as to all its details in 1853, four years 
sooner. The late Mr. Francis H. Underwood 
gave the fullest indication of this when he 
wrote in Our Day (December, 1891): "It 
was the project of a young enthusiast [Mr. 
Underwood himself], who desired to enlist the 
leading authors of New England in the cru- 
sade against slavery, and it had been the 
subject of conferences at intervals with Low- 
ell, Longfellow, and Mrs. Stowe for more 
than three years." The following letters, both 
addressed to me, — I was then living in Worces- 
ter, Massachusetts, — will explain what occurred 
during these intervening years : — 

Boston, November 21, 1853. 

Dear Sir, — Messrs. J. P. Jewett & Co. of this city 

propose to establish a Literary and Anti-Slavery magazine 

— commencing probably in January. The publishers have 

energy and capital, and will spare no pains to make the 



66 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

enterprise completely successful. They will endeavor to 
obtain contributions from the best writers, and will pay 
liberally for all they make use of. Politics and the 
"Humanities," though, of course, prominent as giving 
character to the Magazine, will occupy but a small por- 
tion of its pages. Current literary topics, new books, the 
Fine Arts, and other matters of interest to the reading pub- 
lic will receive the most careful attention. 

I am desired to request you to become a contributor. 
If you are disposed to favor the project, and have anything 
written at this time, please forward the MS. with your 
reply. 

If not, please state whether we may expect to receive 
an article soon — if before Dec. 5th, it will materially 
oblige us. If permitted, we shall announce you as a con- 
tributor, in the prospectus. The articles will all be anony- 
mous, as in Putnam's Monthly. 

Your early attention is respectfully solicited. With 

high regard, 

Truly yours, 

Francis H. Underwood. 

Boston, November 25, 1853. 
My dear Sir, — Our Magazine is not yet definitely 
determined upon. Probably, however, it will be com- 
menced. The letters I wrote for the enlistment of con- 
tributors have been mostly answered favorably. We have 
already a very respectable list engaged. We are waiting 
to hear definitely from Mrs. Stowe, whom we hope will 
be induced to commence in the Feb. no. a new story. 
We are thankful for the interest you manifest by sending 
new names. I shall write to Mr. Hurlbut at once, and to 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 6/ 

the others in a day or two. Those who have already 
promised to write are Mr. Carter (formerly of the Com- 
monwealth), who will furnish a political article for each 
number, Mr. Hildreth (very much interested in the un- 
dertaking), Thos. W. Parsons, author of an excellent 
translation of Dante, Parke Godwin of the New York 
Evening Post, Mr. Ripley of the Tribune, Dr. Elder of 
Phil% H. D. Thoreau of Concord, Theodore Parker (my 
most valued friend), Edmund Quincy, James R. Lowell 
(from whom I have a most exquisite gem). 

Many to whom I have written have not replied as yet. 

I shall have the ^^;?^r^/ supervision of the Magazine, — 
intending to get the best aid from professed litterateurs in 
the several departments. We do expect to pay as much 
as Putnam — that is at the rate of three dollars for such 
pages as Putnam's, though it is probable that we shall use 
a trifle larger type than our New York contemporary. 
Poetry, of course, we pay for according to value. There 
are not above six men in America (known to me) to whom 
I would pay atiything for poetry. There is no medium ; 
it is good or it is good-for-nothing. Lowell I esteem most ; 
after him Whittier (the last I confidently expect to secure). 

The first no. will probably be late — as late as Jan. 5, 
or even loth. It is unavoidable. But in Feb. we shall 
get before the wind. 

Mr. Jewett will be liberal as to heresy. Indeed he is 
almost a heretic himself. For myself I am a member of 
Mr. Parker's society; but as we must get support moral 
and pecuniary from the whole community, we shall strive 
to offend neither side. In haste. 

Most gratefully yours, 

Francis H. Underwood. 



68 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

The magazine thus indicated, which was 
clearly identified in plan and material with the 
Atlaiitic^ was delayed four years in its birth by 
the business failure of John P. Jewett & Co., 
who were to have been its publishers. 

Mr. Underwood himself says, in the same 
article, " After long efforts the due cooperation 
was secured and responsible publishers were 
found to take it up." He elsewhere states, " It 
was planned at a dinner where fourteen persons 
were present." This was presumably the 
dinner of which Longfellow says in his diary 
(May 20, 1857): " Dined in town with the new 
Magazine Club, discussing title, etc., with no 
result." He has already spoken of a previous 
meeting (May 5), when he ** dined in town with 
Emerson, Lowell, Motley, Holmes, Cabot, 
Underwood, and the publisher Phillips, to talk 
about the new magazine the last wishes to 
establish. It will no doubt be done ; though I 
am not so eager about it as the rest." ^ There 
were apparently but eight persons at this dinner, 
one-half of these being of Cambridge birth or 

1 " Journal and Letters," II. pp. 298, 299. Compare Phillips's 
letter in Cooke's " J. S. Dwight," p. 243. 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 69 

residence, since Underwood had lately removed 
thither. Assuming that the meeting of May 
20th was that of which Underwood speaks, we 
know that Longfellow, Underwood, and Felton 
were there, and probably Holmes and Lowell, so 
that this company also was half or almost half 
made up of Cantabrigians. At any rate, the two 
original editors, Lowell and Underwood, were 
Cantabrigians by residence ; and Lowell could 
now transfer to it, on a more liberal scale, the 
plans which he and Robert Carter had formed 
for the short-lived Pioneer. In the later period 
of the magazine, Howells at one time resided 
in Cambridge, as did, for a year, his suc- 
cessor, Aldrich. Its last two editors, Messrs. 
H. E. Scudder and W. H. Page, have been and 
still are denizens of the University city. There 
has thus been no editor of the magazine, ex- 
cept Fields, who has not at some time dwelt 
in Cambridge. 

The following list comprises many of those 
who were during at least some period of the 
Atlantic's existence, if not the whole, to be 
classed as Cambridge authors, together with 
the total of contributions credited to each in 



70 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

the "Atlantic Index," of 1888: W. D. Howells, 
399; T. S. Perry, 355; H. E. Scudder, 196; 
O. W. Holmes, 181 ; G. P. Lathrop, 168 ; W. F. 
Apthorp, 134; Henry James, Jr., 134; J. R. 
Lowell, 132; T. W. Higginson, 117; T. B. 
Aldrich, 1 10 ; John Fiske, 89 ; G. E. Woodberry, 
73; H. W. Longfellow, 68 ; C. P. Cranch, 45; 
C. E. Norton, 44; N. S. Shaler, 32; R. W. 
Emerson, 29; Henry James, Sr., 19; W. W. 
Story, 17; Wilson Flagg, 14; William James, 
12. This is, of course, a merely quantitative 
estimate, in which a brief critical paper may 
count for as much as the most important 
original work ; but the point of interest is that 
it comprises almost every one of those who 
were, tried by this numerical standard, the 
main contributors. Thus judged, it may almost 
be said that the bulk of the magazine, for a 
long series of years, has been furnished by 
those who may in some sense be claimed as 
Cambridge authors. In fact, the only other 
person whose contributions reached the hundred 
mark was Whittier. 

It is thus evident that in the case of the 
Atlantic Monthly ^ as with the North American 



THREE LITERARY EPOCHS 7 1 

Review and the Dial, nearly all the editors and 
most of the larger contributors were either 
natives of Cambridge or at some time residents 
there, apart from their mere college training. 
And it may fairly be claimed that their labors 
were not quite wasted, inasmuch as Motley, who 
was not a Cambridge resident, wrote from Eng- 
land on May 16, 1858, that the Atlantic Monthly 
was at that time " unquestionably the best maga- 
zine in the English language." ^ 

1 Motley's " Letters," L p. 224. 



in 

HOLMES 

It was a favorite theory of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes that every man's biography should be 
studied for several generations before his birth. 
In applying this doctrine to himself I can unfor- 
tunately go no farther back than the matrimo- 
nial engagement of his parents, which was thus 
announced in writing by my own mother, then 
a schoolgirl in Boston, addressing a lady in 
Hingham, whom my mother, being then an or- 
phan, called "mama." 

" Now, mama, I am going to surprise you. 
Mr. Abiel Holmes of Cambridge, whom we so 
kindly chalked out for Miss N. W. [Nancy Will- 
iams, afterward Mrs. Loammi Baldwin] is going 
to be married, & of all folks in the world guess 
who to — Miss Sally Wendell ! I am sure you 
will not believe it, however it is an absolute fact, 
for Harriot and M. Jackson told Miss P. Russell 
so, who told us ; it has been kept secret for six 
75 



76 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

weeks, nobody knows for what, I could not be- 
lieve it for some time & scarcely can now 
however it is a fact they say. Mama must pay 
the wedding visit." 

This piece of girlish logic was ultimately justi- 
fied, and the gossip thus transmitted through a 
series of young ladies was confirmed. The im- 
pression produced by the letter on the most dis- 
tinguished child of this union may be seen in the 
following note : — 

164 Charles St., July 7, 1868. 

My dear Mr. Higginson, — I thank you for the curi- 
ous little scrap of information so nearly involving my dear- 
est interests, — whether I should be myself or somebody 
else, — and such a train of vital facts as my household 
shews {sic) me. 

How oddly our antenatal history comes out! A few 
months ago my classmate Devens told me he had recently 
seen an old woman who spoke of remembering me as a 
baby and that I was brought up on the bottle — which has 
made me feel as tenderly every time I visit my wine cellar 
as Romulus and Remus did when Faustula carried them 
to the menagerie and showed them the wolf in his cage. 

Our life is half under ground — quantu7?i vertice, etc. 

Here are two rootlets of mine that accident has brought 
to light, not very important to the race, but having an odd 
sort of interest for one at least. 

Very truly yours, 

O. W. Holmes. 



HOLMES J^J 

In childhood I became intimate with the 
household circle in which Oliver Wendell 
Holmes was born and bred, the intimacy com- 
ing from the fact that my father's house stood 
next to it and that Dr. Holmes's nephew, 
Charles Parsons, — afterward Professor Parsons 
of Brown University, — was my especial play- 
mate. The place was, like many country par- 
sonages of that day, practically a farmhouse 
with its accompanying acres. It included the 
ground now covered by several college buildings 
in the neighborhood and it extended over the 
playgrounds now called Holmes's Field. There 
were cultivated fields and many outbuildings, 
sheltering horses and cattle ; and one of the 
happiest spots to us was the corn-barn, raised 
on high posts, where we shelled corn on rainy 
days. In the house our favorite playing 
place was the garret described by Dr. Holmes 
in his '' Professor at the Breakfast Table." It 
was in reference to this garret that he wrote, 
"The worst of a modern stylish mansion is that 
it has no place for ghosts." In this garret there 
was abundant room for them ; it possessed 
locked closets for their express accommodation. 



78 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

Looking in through the keyholes we could see 
old leather portmanteaux looking " like stranded 
porpoises," as Holmes describes them, or and- 
irons waiting to resume their places in the chim- 
neys. In the large outer garret we could see 
names written with diamonds on the window- 
panes — names of students who had taken their 
degrees before the Revolutionary War. Among 
them was the name of John Tracy, beneath 
which some one, possibly a rival in scholarship 
or love, had written stttltus by way of brief ver- 
dict. We knew that in this house the battle of 
Bunker Hill was planned, and we knew that on 
yonder green the American soldiers had halted 
for prayers from the college president ere they 
marched to the field. Looking across the com- 
mon, then unfenced, we saw the tree beneath 
which Washington had taken command of the 
Continental Army, and not far off was the old 
churchyard, and Dr. Holmes had made that plot 
of ground classic to us by poems which we 
knew by heart. We pondered over those long 
inscriptions where, as Holmes himself has said, 
"The dead presidents stretched their weary 
bones under epitaphs stretched out at as full 



HOLMES 79 

length as their subjects." We chose out the 
very stone he describes in the poem, " The empty 
urn of pride" as he calls it — the tomb of the 
Vassall family bearing only " the goblet and the 
sun" (Vas-sol) until desecrated in these later 
years by the addition of name and date. 
Holmes had also found out that tombstone of 
the French exile near Christ Church and had 
written : — 

Lean o'er the slender western wall, 

Ye ever-roaming girls ; 
The wind that bids the blossom fall 

May lift your floating curls 
To sweep the simple lines that tell 

An exile's date and doom, 
And sigh, for where his daughters dwell 

They wreathe the stranger's tomb. 

The force of this was not diminished to us 
by the fact that the little Cambridge maidens 
with whom we went to dancing school might 
frequently be seen wandering through the 
churchyard; and that curls were then so uni- 
versally worn, it really seemed as if the 
damsels might have put them on with their 
straw hats. Perhaps more interesting to us 



8o OLD CAMBRIDGE 

than any of these localities was the grave of 
our poet's sister, of whom Holmes wrote: — 

If sinless angels love as we 
Who stood that bier beside, 

Three seraph welcomes greeted thee, 
The daughter, sister, bride. 

And we faithfully took the poet's word for it 
that the locust grove in the churchyard would 
" swing its orient flowers " long after the two 
church spires had crumbled, although now, alas ! 
the grove has long since disappeared, and the 
steeples remain. All this had been a part of Dr. 
Holmes's boyhood, as of mine, and he like me 
had also " tumbled about in a library," namely, 
his own father's, though fourteen years earlier. 
There was an inexhaustible set of volumes in 
it, placed near the floor as if for children to 
reach — the delightful quartos of ** Rees' Cyclo- 
paedia," whose numerous plates of baboons 
and paroquets were to us of endless interest. 
If perchance their attraction waned, there was 
always the resource of building fortresses on the 
floor with the kindly quartos and playing the 
battle of Bunker Hill behind them, using for 
ammunition the store of winter apples then kept 



HOLMES 8 1 

in barrels within the closet of every faithful and 
studious clergyman. How dear this study was 
to Holmes himself may be seen in this letter, 
written after I had described, at a breakfast 
given him by his publishers,^ an occasion where 
his kindly old father had turned from his ser- 
mon or his " American Annals " to draw for us 
in frost on the window-pane a sketch of bristling 
bushes, with stars above and with the whole- 
some motto ^^ Per asp era ad astra'' 

Boston, December 14, 1879. 

My dear HiGGiNSON, — If I have already thanked you 
once it is no matter, — let me thank you again for that 
delightful reminiscence of my father and of the old study. 
I have a set of book shelves in my brain where every vol- 
ume is in its place. I can see the frost on the window — 
though I do not remember the particular season — and act 
over the whole little domestic scene in my imagination. 
Nothing for a long time has called up that picture of the 
study and my kind-hearted old father — not so old or so 
white-haired as I am now, at that time — so vividly as your 
story. . . . 

Once more — twice more, if I have already written, I 
thank you. 

Faithfully yours, 

O. W. Holmes. 

1 Atlantic Monthly, XLV., supplement. 
G 



82 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

Dr. Holmes was born, it will be remembered, 
August 29, 1809, graduated at Harvard in 1829, 
studied law for a year and a half, then studied 
medicine in Europe for two years and a half, 
took his degree at the Harvard Medical School 
in 1836, became Professor at Dartmouth in 
1838, and Professor at the Harvard Medical 
School in 1847. He was thus away from Cam- 
bridge during most of my boyhood, and my 
memory first depicts him vividly when he came 
back to give his Phi Beta Kappa poem in 1841. 
He was at this time a young physician of great 
promise, which was thought to be rather im- 
paired by his amusing himself with poetry. So 
at least, he always thought; and he cautioned 
in later years a younger physician. Dr. Weir 
Mitchell, to avoid the fault which he had com- 
mitted, advising him to be known exclusively as 
a physician until his reputation in that line 
should be made. The effect of levity conveyed 
by this poem — which was in the main a serious, 
not to say a ponderous, one — was due largely 
to certain passages which he described as 
"wanting in dignity" and only partly reprinted 
in an appendix. Especially criticised was one 



HOLMES 83 

passage in which he gallantly enumerated the 
probable names of the various young ladies in 
the gallery, mentioning, for instance, 

A hundred Marys, and that only one 

Whose smile awaits me when my song is done. 

These statistics of admiration were not thought 
altogether suitable to an academic poem, and the 
claim itself in regard to the young lady may 
have proved a little premature, inasmuch as she 
subsequently married Holmes's friend Motley, 
the historian. 

He had undoubtedly in his manners to young 
ladies of that period a tone of airy love-making, 
suitable to one lately returned from gay Paris ; 
and his poem " To a Lady," boasting of the 
change in her manner since he first left America 
" a pallid boy," may easily have had an actual 
foundation. It is to be remembered, however, 
that he had at this period a look of physical 
insignificance, which his middle years greatly 
amended by additional flesh ; at Phi Beta Kappa 
dinners he used to stand up in a chair to sing 
his songs, and his juvenile look was even con- 
sidered something of an obstacle to his early 



84 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

success in medical practice. Dr. Walter Chan- 
ning of Boston, grandfather of the present 
physician of that name, was fond of telling a 
story of his taking Dr. Holmes with him in 
consultation to visit an invalid lady in a suburb 
of Boston, who rose in her bed as they entered 
the room and said peevishly: "Dr. Channing, 
why do you bring that little boy in here .? 
Take him away ! This is no place for boys." 
Upon which the young physician retired in 
wrath and refused to reenter the room when 
the patient was propitiated. 

Dr. Holmes did not remain long in the active 
practice of his profession, but for many years he 
was — as some boy by a fortunate blunder de- 
scribed him — " Professor of Monotony " in the 
Harvard Medical School ; not that his teachings 
were ever monotonous, for they were always 
marked with vivacity and variety ; but it is pos- 
sible that the employment may have sometimes 
grown fatiguing. He varied it by much viva- 
cious social life and by a good deal of lecturing 
before the popular lyceums then so much in 
vogue. He did not go to distant parts of the 
country, but was in New England one of the 



HOLMES 85 

most unfailingly popular among lecturers. He 
met, however, this obstacle in lecturing, as some- 
times in literature, that he made very abrupt 
transitions from humor to pathos, so that his 
hearers did not always follow him ; and some- 
times, when the joke was over and he had sud- 
denly passed into deep emotion, they would not 
recognize the change of key and would laugh 
harder than ever. He was at this time, as 
always, a perpetual fountain of original thought 
and illustration, but did not seem a man of strong 
convictions, and was essentially conservative 
in attitude. The accounts of slave insurrections 
and of the imaginary New York negro plot 
had left upon his mind, as he himself said, 
''impressions which it took Garrison years to 
root out " ; he was easily moved to wrath at 
phrenology, homoeopathy, and all the pseudo- 
sciences as he called them ; but almost equally 
disapproved the prevailing taste for German 
literature, calling Jean Paul, in one poem, ''a 
German-Silver Spoon." 

The later influence of Emerson, and in some 
degree of Lowell, tended to diminish some of 
these antagonisms, and certainly nothing could 



S6 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

be more felicitous than his delineation of Emer- 
son as " an iconoclast who took down our idols 
so gently that it seemed like an act of worship." 
The Civil War on the one side and some tilts 
against theological prejudices, on the other, had 
the effect of throwing him in later life toward 
the party of attack, and, as almost always hap- 
pens in such cases, this seemed a source of 
fresh life and happiness to him. His course of 
development was thus somewhat opposite to 
that of Lowell, who took his radicalism first 
and in a tolerably undiluted form, becoming 
afterward more conservative ; while the even 
nature of Longfellow, tempted into no ex- 
tremes, remained in much the same attitude 
during his whole life. 

In regard to Holmes's intellectual life, it is a 
rare thing for a man nearly fifty years old to 
strike out a wholly new career ; and this doubt- 
less happened to Holmes on the publication of 
the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." This 
is all the more remarkable from the fact that he 
had begun a similar venture long before with- 
out attracting much attention. It is common to 
say that the success of the Autocrat chapters 



HOLMES 8y 

was instantaneous and overwhelming. I am 
sure that this was not quite the case, for I 
remember well that Underwood, when I ex- 
pressed delight at the first number, seemed 
very glad to have me say it, because there 
was, as he said, a minority of readers, who were 
disposed to pooh-pooh it, and maintained that 
Dr. Holmes was ** a tiresome little man." 
This was perhaps only the natural Nemesis 
encountered by a joker of many years' stand- 
ing; at any rate all such malcontents soon passed 
into oblivion and were heard no more. 

He disarmed criticism in the end by courage- 
ously persisting in the same method which had 
originally produced it, namely, by the most 
fearless intimacy with his audience, never keep- 
ing back any jest or any expression of confi- 
dence. He frankly says in one place that good 
talkers are very apt to be bores, — thus meeting 
criticism halfway. The discursiveness of his 
articles only matches the same quality of his 
mind; and there probably never was a man 
whose conversation and whose writing were so 
little unlike. I knew one celebrated talker in 
Rhode Island who astonished a dinner party 



88 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

by reciting the birthdays of all the British 
queens. It seemed a deed impossible except 
for a Macaulay, until later in the day the butler 
brought to the host a little printed volum^e con- 
taining odds and ends of information, and in- 
cluding just this list of queen's birthdays. It 
had fallen from the pocket of this particular 
guest and was restored to him without com- 
ment. Such a misfortune would have been 
absolutely impossible to Dr. Holmes. He had 
no marked development of systematic memory, 
but his accumulation of odds and ends of 
knowledge was unsurpassed, and this is what 
a talker, or indeed a literary man as such, 
chiefly needs. His ready wit supplied the rest. 
It is to be noticed also that he had an arsenal 
of his own in a scientific direction from which 
he could draw weapons not accessible to others. 
He mercilessly talked down other talkers, yet 
not by a strategy, only through an irrepressible 
affluence which left them no room. 

There was a legend that he once met in the 
street the late Tom Appleton, at that time 
the second best talker in Boston, who told him 
a capital story. It turned out that they were 



HOLMES 89 

going to the same dinner party, and Holmes 
said to himself, " That story will be Appleton's 
pihe de resistance ; it will be good fun to cir- 
cumvent him." Accordingly, before they had 
begun upon their soup, Holmes burst out with 
the story. It won immense success, and Apple- 
ton sat glum and silent through the rest of the 
dinner. There was nothing really malicious 
about it ; it was simply a joke, although, it must 
be confessed, a little cruel. If the tables had 
been turned, Holmes would have laughed it off, 
instead of growing morose upon it. Appleton 
was possibly, I have sometimes thought, a more 
brilliant talker than either Holmes or Lowell ; 
while he was not their equal in thought, yet his 
knowledge of society was more varied, and per- 
haps I have never in my life been so heartily 
amused as once at a tete-a-tete dinner with him 
in his bachelor house at Newport, when for two 
hours he mainly sustained the conversation and 
seemed at the end to have passed in review, in 
the most brilHant way, half the celebrities of 
Europe. He was perhaps more arrogant and 
self-imposing than either Holmes or Lowell, 
yet he knew better when to change the subject ; 



90 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

but one never felt quite sure that he was not 
studiously working up a point, which Holmes 
never did ; the flow being too spontaneous for 
that. On the other hand neither of these three 
eminent talkers could be relied upon for tact, 
as was shown at the famous dinner to Dr. and 
Mrs. Stowe which I have elsewhere described, 
and at which Lowell discoursed to Mrs. Stowe 
at one end of the table on the superiority of 
" Tom Jones " to all other novels, while Holmes 
demonstrated to Dr. Stowe, at the other end, 
that profane swearing really originated in the 
pulpit. 

Holmes's literary opinions belonged, as com- 
pared with Lowell's, to an earlier generation. 
Holmes was still influenced by the school of 
Pope, whom Lowell disliked, although his father 
had admired him. We notice this influence 
in Holmes's frequent recurrence to the ten-syl- 
lable verse ; in his unwillingness to substitute 
dactyls for spondees ; and in his comments on 
Emerson's versification, which remind one of 
those of Johnson on Milton. He has a great 
aversion to what he calls "the crowding of a 
redundant syllable into a line." He says, for 



HOLMES 91 

instance, "Can any ear reconcile itself to the 
last of these three lines of Emerson's : — 

" Oh, what is heaven but the fellowship 
Of minds that each can stand against the world 
By its own meek and incorruptible will ? " 

He goes on to denounce " these lines that lift 
their back up in the middle, span-worm lines, 
we may call them," of which he says that 
'' they have invaded some of our recent poetry 
as the canker-worms gather on our elms in 
June." It does not stand recorded how Holmes 
was affected by Coleridge's " Christabel," which 
emancipated EngHsh poetry from the shadow 
of Pope; but it is pretty certain that he would 
not have approved of it. Lyrical and lilting 
measures did not ordinarily appeal to him, 
except in the case of Moore, whose lilt has a 
definite beat, and whose verses he used in 
later life to read to young people who had 
almost forgotten the Irish poet's name. It 
was perhaps partly a result of all this that 
Holmes was, according to the Quarterly Re- 
view, ** at one time in disrepute with the more 
advanced of his countrymen. He was accused 



92 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

of attaching excessive importance to conven- 
tionalities of dress, manners, and speech. He 
was charged with using his influence to starve 
and paralyze literary originality." 

I do not clearly know what was meant by 
the first of these charges, but it might, doubt- 
less, be said that Dr. Holmes was always con- 
ventional, though never in any sense a fop or 
an exquisite — to revert to the phrase of that 
day. With an unconcealed preference for 
what is called the best society, he yet had, in 
his early medical practice, the advantage en- 
joyed by all of that profession, in alternating 
between the houses of rich and poor, and 
learning that they are composed mentally, as 
physically, of much the same material. He 
also had, as Mr. Morse his biographer admits, 
a tinge of the sporting man about him, liked 
to see a fast trot, and describes the taste for 
horse flesh of his own Major Rowens in " Elsie 
Venner" so vividly that the most confirmed 
pedestrian can hardly read the account with- 
out a thrill. He knew the records of the 
prize ring, and sometimes measured the mus- 
cles of fighting champions, perhaps with- 



HOLMES 93 

out ever seeing them fight. Like many small 
men he had a marked appreciation for large 
size, whether in trees or men, loving to measure 
the one or chat with the other. 

For some years before the Civil War, when 
rowing was coming into vogue and wherries 
were built, he used to row on Charles River, and 
he describes his enjoyment of this in an early 
paper of the "Autocrat." He told me that he 
gave this up during the war because of perpet- 
ual solicitude about his son and other favorite 
young men who were at the front; he said 
that he could not bear to be beyond call. He 
thus took his part in the marked rise of in- 
terest in physical training which occurred 
about that time, although his then puny look 
led many people to regard such tastes as being 
somewhat amateurish in him. He suffered 
greatly during his whole career from asthma, 
which many people outgrow with years, 
though he did not. When I lived in New- 
port he once came there to spend a week 
at the house of the late Mrs. John Jacob 
Astor — who was perhaps the last of the 
New York millionnaires to exhibit a positive 



94 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

taste for the society of literary men — and 
that he had to leave, after a single night's 
stay, because of a severe attack of his chronic 
complaint. It is a curious fact about the 
climate of Newport that some people come 
there expressly to be cured of asthma, while 
others have to leave the town in order to 
shake it off. 

Holmes's relation to science now appears, 
when seen from the literary point of view, to 
have been more that of the poet than of the 
man of science. " None but Holmes," says 
Professor Dwight, his associate, "could have 
compared the microscopical coiled tube of a 
sweat-gland to a fairy's intestine." He was 
also one of the early microscopists, and these 
are themselves the poets of science. He sug- 
gested in 1872, before Percival Lowell did, 
the snows on Mars ; and described a plant, 
considered as a companion for a sick room, 
in the true Darwinian spirit as " an innocent, 
delightfully idiotic being that is not troubled 
with any of our poor human weaknesses and 
irritabilities." Dr. Cheever says of him that 
*' he was too sympathetic to practise medicine, 



HOLMES 95 

and when he thought it necessary to use a 
freshly killed rabbit for demonstration he 
always left his assistant to chloroform it and 
besought him not to let it squeak." He 
beheved in the elevating influence of the 
medical profession, and said that " Goldsmith 
and even Smollett, both having studied and 
practised medicine, could not, by any possibil- 
ity, have outraged all the natural feelings in 
delicacy and decency, as Swift and Zola have 
outraged them." Yet Holmes gave away his 
medical books in middle life to the Boston 
Medical Library ; and after this he prized 
science as the poet loves it for the images 
and analogies it affords, even as Coleridge 
went to Sir Humphry Davy's lectures in 
order to acquire a stock of new metaphors. 
In speaking of Holmes's relation to the re- 
forms going on about him, it is pleasant to 
recall an occasion where both his generosity and 
his wit were called into play, when there was 
some agitation among his students in regard 
to the practice of medicine by women. At 
the opening of the new building of the Har- 
vard Medical School, after speaking, in his 



96 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

address, on woman as a nurse, he said, " I have 
always felt that this was rather the vocation 
of woman than general medical, and especially- 
surgical, practice." This was received with 
loud applause from the conservative side, then 
prevailing. He quietly went on, " Yet I myself 
followed the course of lectures given by the 
young Madame Lachapelle in Paris; and if 
here and there an intrepid woman insists on 
taking by storm the fortress of medical educa- 
tion, I would have the gate flung open to her, 
as if it were that of the citadel of Orleans and 
she Joan of Arc returning from the field of 
victory." Professor D wight, who was present, 
adds : " The enthusiasm which this sentiment 
called forth was so overwhelming, that those of 
us who had led the first applause felt, perhaps 
looked, rather foolish. I have since suspected 
that Dr. Holmes, who always knew his audience, 
had kept back the real climax to lure us to our 
destruction." ^ 

His theological heresies, as they were once 
considered, were really the outcome of the 
scientific habit of his mind ; and perhaps partly 

1 Holmes's " Life and Letters," I. p. i86. 



HOLMES 97 

of that impulse which makes the most conserva- 
tive temperament yearn to identify itself, at least 
for once in its life, with the party of revolt. 
It will seem incredible in future years that 
young people were sometimes forbidden to read 
the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," as 
being a work of irreligious tendency ; yet its 
author's criticisms on the then established faith 
of New England were from the point of view of 
human sympathy and not of technical theology. 
He did not wish, in his own words, to suggest 
perplexities in order to " bother Bridget, the 
wild Irish girl, or Joyce Heth, the centenarian, 
or any other intellectual non-combatant " ; but 
he simply wished to base religion upon justice 
and common humanity. The sentence which 
seemed most profane, " If a created being has 
no rights which his Creator is bound to 
respect, there is an end to all moral relations 
between them," would now alarm few thinking 
persons. The " crippled souls " of the world 
were those who roused all his sympathy most 
promptly. As for the external side, he was all 
his life a regular church-goer on the ground, 
as he said, that there was " in the corner of his 



98 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

heart a plant called Reverence, which needed to 
be watered about once a week." 

It was on yet deeper questions that his 
three novels, well characterized by an elderly 
lady as his "medicated novels," all turned in 
different degrees. The first of these, " Elsie 
Venner," achieved a permanent fame both as 
a picture of New England life and as a scien- 
tific study. How widely either has achieved 
that popular recognition which is so poor a 
test of literary work cannot now be told. It 
is known that in one country town of New 
England, the local bookseller, on being asked 
if he had any of Dr. Holmes's novels, replied 
that he had never heard of him or them, 
but that Mrs. Mary Jane Holmes had written 
lovely books and that he had some of those. 
He himself would have enjoyed this joke, for 
he says with his accustomed cheerfulness, " The 
highways of literature are spread over with 
shells of dead novels, each of which the age has 
swallowed up at a mouthful and done with." 

He certainly cannot be charged with neglect- 
ing among these abstract speculations the essen- 
tial qualities of conscience or even of religious 



HOLMES 



99 



faith. Few persons have stated this last more 
finely than where he says, after pointing out 
that there are two sides to every one, as with 
a piece of money, " I've seen an old woman 
who wouldn't fetch five cents if you put her 
up at auction, and yet, come to read the 
other side of her, she had a trust in God 
Almighty that was like the bow anchor of a 
three-decker." 

Side by side with this fine recognition must 
be placed that admirable letter to Mr. James 
William Kimball, in which Dr. Holmes states 
his creed as definitely and clearly as one who 
passes for a heretic can be expected to pre- 
sent it. 

March i8, i860. 

... I reciprocate all your kindly feelings most cor- 
dially, and I have no doubt that if all the "evangelicals '' 
I have known had had hearts and tempers like yours, I 
should have looked less critically at some of their beliefs. 
Let me repeat it, — I have no wish to change your belief 
in anything, so far as it is adapted to your spiritual nature 
and necessities. Much of it I share with you : a supreme 
and absolute faith in one great Father ; a revelation of 
Himself, "at sundry times and in divers manners," — in- 
fallibly in creation, more or less fallibly in all that has 
been committed to human tradition, preeminently in the 



lOO OLD CAMBRIDGE 

life of one of the " sons of God " known on earth as the 
Anointed, of whom we have some imperfect records. That 
religion consists in holy affections, the evidence of which 
is in righteous life. If you believe that man is born under 
a curse derived from Adam, I do not. If you believe that 
a finite being is allowed to ruin himself forever, I do not. 
At any rate I am sure you hope not. If you accept the 
whole collection of tracts called "the Bible" — the canon 
of which represents a inajority vote, nothing more or less 

— as infallible, I think your ground is demonstrably un- 
tenable. ^ 

If it is to be admitted, as it generally is, 
that " The Chambered Nautilus " is the high- 
water mark of Holmes's poetry, — and this 
not merely from the perfect beauty of its 
structure, but from the elevation of its theme, 

— it is worth while to notice that remarkable bit 
of prose statement left behind by him in a letter 
written impromptu to Mr. John Lindley on the 
subject of personal immortality. It is justly 
designated by Mr. J. T. Morse, who edits it, as 
"very striking" and he adds, "It stands by 
itself solitary, so far as I know, amid all that 
he has publicly or privately written." An 
exquisitely truthful and delicate statement of 

^ Holmes's " Life and Letters," II. p. 147. 



HOLMES lOI 

the highest point of conviction yet attained 
on that subject by many highly trained minds, 
it also seems to me a wonderfully condensed 
and vigorous piece of writing, and it is to be 
read in connection with that remarkable pas- 
sage in ** Elsie Venner," where the author 
speculates in respect to the attempted murder 
of his young schoolmaster. 

Boston, December 28, 1867. 

Dear Sir, — I should prefer to say that I trust there 
will be a righting of this world's evils for each and all of 
us in a future state, than say that I share the unquestioning 
certainty of many of those about me. 

The natural argument seems to me agamst the suppo- 
sition. In the year 1800 I was not, to the best of my 
knowledge. Since that time my consciousness has been 
evoked and my experiences have been accumulated. I do 
not see that I have any natural ground for claiming the 
future any more than the past, — other than my conviction 
that it is or ought to be so, — a conviction which is some- 
times strong and at other times weak, as in the experience 
of many others. 

I have seen many human consciousnesses put together, 
like my own. They were at one time represented by the 
unconscious life of ova. By and by they got sense, intel- 
lect, will, conscience, experience. 

But I have seen many consciousnesses taken to pieces 
also ; they lost the senses to a great extent ; the intellect 
and of course the conscience with the will were enfeebled. 



102 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

almost lost, and the experiences of life so erased that the 
wife forgot her husband, the mother her children. 

The natural conclusion would be that this gradual 
decay ends in extinction. The question might well be 
asked, whether the individuality, so nearly lost in this 
world, is likely to be restored by the destruction of the 
organism. I hope and trust that my feelings are right, 
which tell me that this world demands a complement. 

If the evidence of the New Testament is a proof (and 
not merely a probability of a certam value, variously 
estimated by different honest persons), there is no need of 
asking the question. 

One thing seems to me clear, — that if the future life is 
to be for the bulk of mankind what the larger part of our pul- 
pits teach, namely, a condition of hopeless woe, there is no 
reason why we should wish to have proof of another life. 

The more I consider the doctrine of eternal punishment, 
the more it seems to me a heathen invention, which has 
found its way into Christianity, and entirely inconsistent 
with the paternal character attributed to the Deity. (We 
must carry to any future sphere the characters we form 
here ; and these must influence, if they do not determine, 
our condition. Yet it seems in accordance with the 
paternal principle that any punishment should be reforma- 
tory and not vindictive.) 

One thing is certain : it is impossible to disprove the 
reality of a future life, and we have all a right to cherish 
the hope that we may live again under more favorable cir- 
cumstances, and be able to account for these prehminary 
arrangements, which, as a finality, are certainly unsatis- 
factory.^ 

1 Holmes's " Life and Letters," I. p. 288. 



HOLMES 103 

It must be remembered that Holmes was con- 
stitutionally conservative, and the element of 
whim came in to make him even more so in 
appearance than he actually was. His favorite 
character, Little Boston, was a fanciful ex- 
aggeration of his own innocent cockneyism. In 
his day Beacon Street was still precisely what 
he called it, '' The sunny street that holds the 
sifted few," and young men and maidens in 
good society carried on their courtships while 
walking round the Common or down the long 
path or on the mill-dam. *' Whom does Ara- 
bella walk with now ? " was a question occasion- 
ally heard in careful circles of maiden aunts. 
Holmes did not really desire any larger social 
arena, and moreover got all the rural life he 
wanted through his summer visits in Pittsfield. 
He was conservative on the slavery question until 
the Civil War, hated quacks and fanatics with 
honest and unflinching hostility, and it was only 
the revolt of his kindly nature against Calvinism 
which threw him finally on the side of progress. 
The Saturday Club with all its attractions did not 
lead him in that direction. It brought together 
an agreeable set of cultivated men, but none of 



I04 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

the more strenuous reformers of its day, how- 
ever brilliant, except Emerson and occasionally 
Sumner and Howe. Edmund Quincy and 
James Freeman Clarke were not admitted until 
1875, after the abolition of slavery. Garrison, 
Parker, PhilHps, Alcott, Wasson, Weiss, and 
William Henry Channing were never members 
of the Saturday Club and probably never could 
have been elected to it; but they were to be 
looked for every month at the Radical Club, — 
afterward called the Chestnut Street Club, — 
which certainly rivalled the Saturday in brill- 
iancy in those days, while it certainly could 
not be said of it, as Dr. Holmes said of the 
Saturday, "We do nothing but tell our old 
stories ; we never discuss anything." Possibly 
all such gatherings tend to be somewhat more 
conspicuous in retrospect as time goes on ; 
men recall the bright sayings and forget the 
occasional gaps of triviality or dulness. I re- 
member when Fields, on once inviting me to 
dine with him at the Saturday Club, during a 
visit to Boston, cautioned me not to expect too 
much; "We are sometimes stupid," he said. 
I know that in thinking of the Atlantic 



HOLMES 105 

Club I still recall with fatigue the propensity 
which Lowell shared with Holmes for dis- 
cussing theology. After all, the Five Points 
of Calvinism have this in common with measles 
or the whooping-cough : they are interesting to 
those who are liable to them or have got over 
them ; but to those who have never gone 
through them they are rather tiresome subjects. 
As to the Radical Club, Holmes in later years 
made an address there himself on one of his 
speculative themes. 

Perhaps, indeed, Holmes's talk was not to 
be seen at best advantage in his pet clubs 
where he sat as undisputed autocrat, while in 
the more familiar intercourse of common life 
his conversational fertility can hardly be ex- 
aggerated, and was, perhaps, never surpassed 
even by Sydney Smith. There was certainly 
no one in his day with whom it was so 
impossible to spend five minutes without bring- 
ing away something worth recalling. This has 
descended, it is said, to his son Judge Holmes, 
of whom a young law student once said to 
me that, being allowed a seat in the Judge's 
office, he chose the seat next to him in order 



I06 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

to get the cream of the thoughts which had 
invariably come to his chief during his morning 
walk across Boston Common. With the father 
it was the same, his mental activities being 
wholly impulsive and yet ever ready to take hold 
of every point offered by another. If noth- 
ing offered, the jest ripened in his own head, 
and blossomed by itself. I remember that one 
morning, during a brief call at Fields's office, 
Holmes came in on an errand, having a book 
done up in paper under his arm, and as he was 
going out suddenly turned and said : " I have 
here a most wonderful book. It is worth in 
money value any other book in Boston. In 
fact it is worth a whole library. If it could 
be properly edited and illustrated, as I would 
do it, it would be worth the whole public library 
put together." Nodding to us authoritatively, 
he shut the door, leaving us looking at one 
another, too bewildered for conjecture. Pres- 
ently the door opened again quietly, and Dr. 
Holmes put in his head, his face bubbling over 
with amusement, and said : " Oh, I forgot to 
tell you what book this is. It is Nat Thayer's 
check-book." Then he shut the door. The 



HOLMES \0f 

gentleman thus designated was understood at 
that time to be the richest man in Boston. 

With a mind in which unexpected bubbles 
of fun were thus liable to come to the surface 
at any moment, there was naturally combined 
a temperament which not only took delight in 
them but in all the cheerful side of human 
existence. Comparing the temperaments of 
these eminent friends, Holmes might be desig- 
nated as sunny, Longfellow as equable, and 
Lowell as variable and given to extremes. 
Holmes had, moreover, fewer domestic sorrows 
than his two friends, but on the other hand 
had by reason of his greater longevity the 
hardest trial of old age, in the sense of finding 
himself alone through the departures of his 
contemporaries. He did not lament over this, 
but there is abundant evidence that he felt 
it deeply. Few men have had in their later 
years such an intoxicating ovation as was 
awarded to him in England at the age of 
seventy-seven; but he wrote five years after 
to Whittier: **We are lonely, very lonely, in 
these last years. . . . We were on deck to- 
gether as we began the voyage of life two 



I08 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

generations ago. A whole generation passed, 
and the succeeding one found us in the cabin 
with a goodly number of coevals. Then the 
craft which held us began going to pieces, 
until a few of us were left on the raft pieced 
together of its fragments. And now the raft 
has at last parted, and you and I are left 
clinging to the solitary spar, which is all that 
still remains afloat of the sunken vessel." ^ 
He died on October 7th, 1894. 

1 Holmes's " Life and Letters," II. p. 315. 



IV 

LONGFELLOW 



IV 

LONGFELLOW 

Unlike Holmes and Lowell, Longfellow was 
not born in a college town; but he went at 
fifteen to live in one, and that a very character- 
istic one, not differing essentially in its tradi- 
tions from that in which he spent his later life, 
although all the academic associations at Bow- 
doin College were on a smaller scale than at 
Harvard. As Fluellen says in ** Henry V." that 
there is a river in Macedon and a river in Mon- 
mouth and there are salmons in both, so it may 
be said that Brunswick has somewhat the same 
relation to the Androscoggin that Cambridge 
bears to the Charles ; and the open sea is 
within a few hours' sail from each, so that 
there were, or might have been at some period, 
salmons in both. Each town had then broad 
country roads shaded by elm trees, and each 
still has large colonial houses, in two at least 
of which — both yet standing — Longfellow 



112 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

lived at different times. In each town the 
college buildings were of red brick, — " the 
Muses' factories " as Lowell says, — and al- 
though both the room where Longfellow lodged 
at Brunswick and that in which he taught have 
since been destroyed by fire, yet the primitive 
aspect can be easily restored by the imagina- 
tion. In one thing Brunswick had and has 
the advantage over Cambridge — in possess- 
ing a tract of many acres of fine old pine 
woods, on whose intersecting paths it is easy 
at this day for the fancy to represent Haw- 
thorne and Longfellow as coming and going; 
and in having also, not far off, the wild and 
hilly region described in Hawthorne's " Fan- 
shawe." 

Bowdoin College cherishes with affection its 
few memorials of Longfellow, yet I found none 
of these more noticeable on a recent visit than 
the printed list of students in 1821 — the num- 
ber being only 114 in all and given on a single 
page, yet including an unusually large propor- 
tion of men nationally famous. The little col- 
lege, then only twenty years old, contributed 
to literature, out of its undergraduates, Long- 



LONGFELLOW II3 

fellow and Hawthorne, then spelled Hathornc ; 
to public life, Franklin Pierce, President of 
the United States; to the medical profession, 
Drs. Luther V. Bell and D. Humphreys 
Storer; and to the Christian ministry, Calvin 
E. Stowe and George B. Cheever. The corre- 
sponding four classes at Harvard had more 
than twice the number of students (252), 
but I do not think the proportion of men 
of national reputation was quite so large, 
although the Harvard list included Admiral 
C. H. Davis, Charles Francis Adams, Frederick 
Henry Hedge, George Ripley, and Sears 
Cook Walker. 

It is interesting also to note the records of 
the library kept in Longfellow's clear and 
delicate hand; the old copy of Horace, which 
had previously belonged to Calvin E. Stowe, 
and out of which Longfellow made the transla- 
tion which practically determined his career, 
since its merit led to his selection by the 
Faculty as the future Professor of Modern Lan- 
guages in the college. It is curious also to 
observe on the College Commencement '' Order 
of Performances" that the subject originally 



114 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

assigned to him, " The Life and Writings of 
Chatterton," was corrected by pen and ink 
after printing, and the title " Our Native 
Writers " substituted. We know from his own 
letters that he wrote the paper on Chatterton 
two months before it was due, but that at the 
suggestion of his father, then in Congress at 
Washington, he substituted the other, appar- 
ently at the last moment. The oration itself 
may be found printed in the Boston Every Other 
Saturday oi April 12, 1884. 

Cambridge began to exert an influence on 
Longfellow before he reached it, for while his 
father urged him to study law — a Moloch which 
he like Holmes and Lowell barely escaped — he 
stipulated that, in this case, he should first have 
some post-graduate study at Harvard in general 
literature. This was his announcement of his 
plans to his father (December 5, 1824): *' I 
want to spend one year at Cambridge for the 
purpose of reading history and of becoming 
familiar with the best authors in polite litera- 
ture; whilst at the same time I can be ac- 
quiring a knowledge of the Italian language, 
without an acquaintance with which I shall 



LONGFELLOW 1 1 5 

be shut out from one of the most beautiful de- 
partments of letters. The French I mean to 
understand pretty thoroughly before I leave col- 
lege. After leaving Cambridge I would attach 
myself to some literary periodical publication, 
by which I could maintain myself and still en- 
joy the advantages of reading. Now I do not 
think that there is anything visionary or chi- 
merical in my plan thus far. The fact is — and 
I will not disguise it in the least, for I think I 
ought not — the fact is, I most eagerly aspire 
after future eminence in literature : my whole 
soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly 
thought centres in it." Writing nearly a month 
later (December 31), he says to his father, " Let 
me reside one year at Cambridge, let me study 
belles-lettres, and after that time it will not re- 
quire a spirit of prophecy to predict with some 
kind of certainty the kind of figure I could make 
in the literary world." A wise letter from his 
father urges that ** there is not wealth enough 
in this country to afford encouragement and 
patronage to merely literary men," but consents 
to his son's going to Cambridge for a year at 
the curiously moderate expense of $184. Mean- 



Il6 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

while the plan of sending him to Europe to 
prepare for his college professorship super- 
seded all this, and he left home in April, 
1826, for New York, where he was to take 
the ship for Paris. On the way he dined 
with George Ticknor in Boston, heard Dr. 
Channing preach, met Rev. Charles Lowell, 
and on Monday went to Cambridge and saw 
President Kirkland. At Northampton he met 
Messrs. George Bancroft and J. G. Cogswell, 
who gave him letters to European notabilities 
and advised a year's residence at Gottingen. 
His mother wrote to him, " I will not say how 
much we miss your elastic step, your cheerful 
voice, your melodious flute." His father wrote, 
" In all your ways remember the God by whose 
power you were created, by whose goodness you 
are sustained and protected." It all seems more 
like the anxious departure from home of one of 
Goethe's or Jean Paul's youthful wanderers than 
like the easy manner in which a modern student 
buys his ticket and goes on board ship. Yet it 
was for Longfellow the parting of the ways and 
the beginning of a new Hfe. The European 
letters of previous American student-travellers, 



LONGFELLOW II7 

and especially those of Ticknor, Everett, and 
Cogswell, as lately published in the Harvard 
Graduates' Magazine} show what a new world 
then opened upon young American students in 
Europe. Longfellow journeyed in Spain with 
Lieutenant Alexander Slidell (afterward Mac- 
kenzie), who says of him in his book, '' A Year 
in Spain " : ''He was just from college, full of 
all the ardent feeUng excited by classical pur- 
suits, with health unbroken, hope that was a 
stranger to disappointment, curiosity that had 
never yet been fed to satiety. Then he had 
sunny locks, a fresh complexion, and a clear 
blue eye, all indications of a joyous tempera- 
ment." Longfellow enjoyed the cheery society 
of Washington Irving, whom he describes as 
"one of those men who put you at ease with 
them in a moment." 

He thus states the sum of his European work, 
in writing to his father : — 

*' I feel no kind of anxiety for my future 
prospects. Thanks to your goodness, I have 
received a good education. I know you can- 
not be dissatisfied with the progress I have 

1 September, 1897. 



Il8 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

made in my studies. I speak honestly, not 
boastingly. With the French and Spanish 
languages I am familiarly conversant, so as 
to speak them correctly, and write them with 
as much ease and fluency as I do the English. 
The Portuguese I read without difficulty. And 
with regard to my proficiency in the Italian, 
I have only to say that all at the hotel where 
I lodge took me for an Italian until I told 
them I was an American. 

" I intend leaving Venice in a few days for 
Dresden. I do not wish to return without 
competent knowledge of German ; and all that 
I can do to acquire it shall be done. The 
time is short, but I hope to turn it to good 
advantage." 

It is to be noticed that in this same letter 
he declines with some indignation the sugges- 
tion of the Bowdoin College Faculty to change 
his professorship to a tutorship. It was a 
change suggested only because of their want 
of funds, but he emphasized his refusal. It 
is interesting to know that he wrote to Carey 
and Lea, the Philadelphia publishers, giving 
a list of New England sketches which he had 



LONGFELLOW II9 

planned, but only one of which ever appeared, 
including studies of the Indians, of the White 
Mountains, and of Acadie. His mind thus 
seems to have worked curiously in line with 
Hawthorne as to themes; and this, like his 
selection of a theme for his Commencement 
Oration, shows that Margaret Fuller was too 
hasty in imputing to him an exotic quality, 
from the accident that his first prose books 
were on foreign subjects. Both " Evangeline " 
and " Hiawatha " already existed, by impli- 
cation, in the titles of these early sketches. 

He was three years abroad and wrote to 
his sister, " My poetic career is finished." On 
his return in 1829 he became Professor in 
Bowdoin College. He still wrote, "If ever I 
pubUsh a volume of poetry it will be many 
years first " — it being actually nine. He pub. 
Hshed text-books and wrote "Outre-Mer," the 
first sketches for which originally appeared 
in the New England Magazine. In 1831 he 
was married to the daughter of the Hon. Barrett 
Potter of Portland, Mary Storer Potter. She 
came of a family noted for a beauty which 
is prolonged into the present generation, and 



120 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

even the inadequate portrait of her, which 
is in their possession, vindicates the tradition. 
It shows her to have had dark hair — dressed 
high, in the fashion of those times — with deep 
blue eyes, a sweet expression, and dignified 
though dainty bearing. Her mental training 
had some peculiar characteristics, owing to the 
traditions of the period and the whims of her 
father, who believed Latin and Greek to be 
unsuitable for girls, while he was willing to 
encourage mathematics to any extent, and to 
some degree modern languages. Her papers, 
many of which are in my possession, include 
several calculations of eclipses, probably as 
book-problems only ; and they also indicate an 
excellent range of English reading, both in prose 
and verse. Here and there occur among them 
translations by Longfellow from Spanish or 
ItaHan, in his own clear handwriting. Nothing 
brings back to me the youthful poet like these 
interspersed translations : they show her as 
already the partner of his literary interests, and 
it seems but a step from this youthful compan- 
ionship to the later memories of " Footsteps 
of Angels." 



LONGFELLOW 121 

And with them that being beauteous, 
Who unto my youth was given, 

More than all things else to love me, 
And is now a saint in heaven. 

That she helped him directly as well as indi- 
rectly is plain from the fact that in his Bow- 
doin lectures, which exist only in manuscript, 
there are illustrative passages in her hand- 
writing. This poetic companionship went on 
in a delightful house still standing in Bruns- 
wick, with its sunny windows looking out on 
a lawn with large pine trees, of which spot 
he writes (June 23, 1831) that he could almost 
fancy himself in Spain from the softness of 
the air ; that the shadow of the honeysuckle 
lies upon the floor " like a figure in the carpet," 
and that the humming-birds have their nests 
in the honeysuckle — as is still the case. Here 
he lived and worked hard, rising day after day 
at five in the morning, as his diary shows ; 
but all his plans were again changed when 
in 1834 he received an invitation to be the 
successor of George Ticknor as Smith Professor 
of Modern Languages in Harvard University, 
opportunity being given, by special arrange- 



122 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

ment with Mr. Ticknor, of eighteen months 
of added study in Europe. This seemed the 
more appropriate, as Mr. Ticknor's fine and 
scholarly career had always been an object of 
admiration to his young successor; and the 
manuscript of Longfellow's Inaugural Address 
as Professor at Bowdoin College, carefully pre- 
served in the library of that institution, sug- 
gests Mr. Ticknor so strongly, both in style 
and handwriting, that it might almost pass 
for his. In 1835 he sailed for Europe, with 
his wife, having first arranged for the publica- 
tion of ''Outre-Mer." Mrs. Longfellow died at 
Rotterdam, on November 26 of that year, in 
childbirth. 

I have dwelt thus fully on this ante-Can- 
tabrigian life of Longfellow, because it really 
prepared the way for the other, being essen- 
tially an academical life on a small scale and 
testing the same qualities afterward mani- 
fested in a somewhat larger sphere. Long- 
fellow's studies and successes at Brunswick 
were what secured his transplantation to Cam- 
bridge ; and even his growing reputation as 
a poet was extended to the neighborhood of 



LONGFELLOW 1 23 

Boston by the repetition at Harvard College, 
in 1833, of the poem delivered by him in the 
previous autumn before the Bowdoin Chapter 
of the Phi Beta Kappa. At Cambridge the 
poem was, for some reason, given first in 
order, and Edward Everett, the orator, after- 
ward announced that his subject also was 
" Education," and that he was " but a fol- 
lower in the field where the flashing sickle 
had already passed." It is remembered that 
when the young professor afterward came 
to Harvard some of the Cambridge ladies 
were wont to speak of him as the Flashing 
Sickle. 

Longfellow's first residence in Cambridge 
(1836) was in the large house now known as 
the Foxcroft House and maintained by the Uni- 
versity as a students' boarding-house. Here 
he formed an intimacy with Professor Felton, 
''heartiest of Greek professors," as Dickens 
called him ; and the circle was often enlarged 
by the society of Charles Sumner, then libra- 
rian of the Law School ; of George Stillman 
Hillard, then a young lawyer; and of Henry 
Russell Cleveland, an eminent scholar and 



124 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

teacher, then residing at Pine Bank on Ja- 
maica Pond. These five were known among 
themselves as the Five of Clubs ; and came 
to be known by a too censorious public as 
"The Mutual Admiration Club," and this 
much earlier than the application of the same 
name to the Atlantic contributors. It is, 
doubtless, the name instinctively applied by 
the world outside to those little circles of men 
of letters which are as inevitable and as inno- 
cent as similar companionships among artists 
or inventors. In this case, however, it was 
so emphatically insisted upon that, when Fel- 
ton had praised, in the Christian Examiner^ 
an article by Longfellow, some unknown hand 
indorsed the page at the Athenaeum Library, 
" Insured at the Mutual." 

In 1837 Mr. Longfellow removed to the 
house of Mrs. Craigie, that ancient and pic- 
turesque widow described by Lowell in his 
" Fireside Travels," who sat at the window 
black-garbed and white-capped, reading Vol- 
taire; and who forbade the destruction of 
the canker-worms on the ground that '* we are 
all worms, worms." It is true, as Lowell 



LONGFELLOW I25 

sternly says, that "the canker years had left 
her leafless too ; " but this could not be said 
of Miss Sally Lowell, a maiden lady who 
later became a resident of the large build- 
ing, in friendly juxtaposition with Longfellow, 
and whose perpetual and sparrow-like vivacity 
made her a companion of the young, as I 
can testify, to her latest years. The Craigie 
House was then more beautiful than now, 
by reason of the great elm trees — "ten mag- 
nificent elms," as he wrote in 1839,^ — which 
reached the grass with their pendent boughs 
and have since perished of sheer old age. 
Longfellow however greatly improved the ap- 
pearance of the grounds by the low-fenced 
terrace which is so appropriate that one finds 
it hard not to carry that appendage back to 
the time of Washington. 

Craigie House has played a much larger part 
in Cambridge tradition than the houses which 
were also the birthplaces of Holmes and Low- 
ell. Those who have spent summers in Cam- 
bridge within the last ten years must know 
well — such is certainly my own experience — 

1 " Life of Longfellow " by his brother, L p. 325. 



126 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

that twice as many strangers inquired the 
way to Craigie House as to Elmwood and 
" the gambrel-roofed house " put together ; and 
though this might be partly due to asso- 
ciations with Washington, yet I am confident 
that these made but a small portion of the 
whole interest in the abode. I have seldom 
felt so keenly the real worth of popular fame 
as when one summer day, in passing Craigie 
House, I found a young man of somewhat 
rustic appearance and sunburned look eagerly 
questioning two other youths as to the where- 
abouts of the " Spreading Chestnut Tree " 
mentioned in ''The Village Blacksmith." Com- 
ing to their relief I explained to him that 
the tree in question was never at that point 
and had now vanished altogether, but offered 
to show him where it once was, and where 
the blacksmith shop of Dexter Pratt had 
stood. Walking down the street with him, I 
won his confidence by telling him that I was 
one of the Cambridge-bred boys who had 
''looked in at the open door"; that the black- 
smith's wife, Rowena Pratt, had been my 
nurse, and that I had, in later life, heard 



LONGFELLOW I 27 

her daughter sing. He told me in return that 
he was a young Irishman, arrived in this 
country but the day before, that the first 
poetry he had ever quite learned by heart at 
school was "The Village Blacksmith," and 
that he had resolved that his first act on 
reaching Boston should be to visit the Chest- 
nut Tree. "This," I said to myself, "is 
fame." 

But to Longfellow's modest and social nature, 
personal companionship was nearer than fame, 
and the admiring curiosity of strangers was less 
a satisfaction than to make his own house the 
centre, as he did, for what was best in Cam- 
bridge. In this he went far beyond his two 
eminent contemporaries, — Holmes, of course, 
having in maturity no home in Cambridge, 
while Lowell's house was less easily accessible, 
and the dehcate health of his wife made 
their home less of a resort for others. Long- 
fellow's diaries, so admirably edited by his 
brother, offer a constant record of visitors more 
or less transient. This was especially true 
after his second marriage; before this in 1838 
he writes that he dines at five or six, " generally 



128 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

in Boston." He then continues, " In the even- 
ing I walk on the Common with Hillard, or 
alone; then go back to Cambridge on foot. 
If not very late, I sit an hour with Felton or 
Sparks. For nearly two years I have not 
studied at night, save now and then. Most 
of the time am alone ; smoke a good deal ; 
wear a broad-brimmed black hat, black frock- 
coat, a black cane. Molest no one. Dine out 
frequently. In winter go much into Boston 
society." 

This mention of the broad-brimmed black 
hat — now incredible — suggests the criticisms, 
still remembered in Cambridge, which were 
made upon Mr. Longfellow's youthful taste for 
becoming costume. He was undoubtedly think- 
ing of himself when in " Hyperion " he made 
the Baron say to Paul Fleming, "The ladies 
already begin to call you Wilhelm Meister, 
and they say that your gloves are a shade too 
light for a strictly virtuous man." He perhaps 
also thought of it when he wrote to Sumner, 
then in Europe, " If you have any tendency to 
* curl your hair and wear gloves,' like Edgar in 
*Lear,' do it before your return." Even Mrs. 



LONGFELLOW 1 29 

Craigie, it is said, thought that he had " some- 
what too gay a look."^ He was viewed, it must 
be remembered, against a background of Har- 
vard professors, whose costume did not in those 
days — if even now it does — savor of splendor. 
It was also a period of much gayer waistcoats 
than now and of great amplitude of cravats. 
The criticism of Longfellow's own toilet had 
an especial biographical interest in the pecul- 
iar wrath inspired among his friends by Mar- 
garet Fuller's phrase '*a dandy Pindar" as 
applied to his picture in the first illustrated 
edition of his works ; for although the phrase 
was perfectly applicable to the engraving, 
it was generally regarded, and possibly with 
some shade of justice, as being a personal hit 
at the poet himself. It is one inconvenience 
of great amiability and moderation of char- 
acter, that a man of this type usually has 
friends more combative, who wish to fight his 
battles for him. Lowell in particular was quite 
ready to take up the cause of his calmer friend, 
and thus perpetuate some antagonisms which 
would have fallen harmlessly aside from the 

1 " Life of Longfellow " by his brother, I. p. 246. 



130 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

smooth surface of Longfellow's more even 
temperament. 

Socially, also, it is to be remembered that 
Boston as well as Cambridge was then a much 
smaller community than now ; and that the 
good old habit not merely of dinner parties 
but of mixed evening entertainments prevailed 
more fully. The somewhat indolent practice 
of afternoon teas had not then displaced the 
larger evening receptions, where older and 
younger guests met, and those who wished 
played whist or " Boston," while others danced. 
The same was true in a degree of Cambridge 
society also. Longfellow's marriage in June, 
1843, to Miss Frances Appleton, daughter of 
the Hon. Nathan Appleton of Boston, fixed 
him in his social relations, aided by the dignity 
and beauty of a charming woman. Craigie 
House became his own, and was perhaps 
more than any other dwelling in Cambridge 
the centre of a generous hospitality. It is 
evident from his published diaries that he had 
many foreign visitors, of whom he sometimes 
complains that they were more ready to give 
information about his country than to receive 



LONGFELLOW 131 

it, and his diaries form an imperfect record 
of the constant stream of kindnesses that flowed 
from his generous heart. 

It was the unusual experience of Mr. Long- 
fellow to be best known by his long poems, espe- 
cially by ** Hiawatha" and "Evangeline," both 
of which were experiments somewhat distrusted 
by his intimate friends and both of which met 
with a good deal of criticism, especially in re- 
spect of metre, after their publication. Their 
success was the more remarkable, as poems on 
Indian subjects had up to that time been uni- 
formly unsuccessful in America, and those on 
historical themes had not fared much better. It 
was, however, his short poems which first made 
him known, and these derived strength from 
their simplicity and from being near to the pop- 
ular heart. It has latterly been somewhat the 
fashion to underrate them, but those who recall 
the time when they appeared will testify to the 
warmth with which they were received, and 
will admit that Longfellow's biographer does 
not speak too strongly when he says of the 
" Psalm of Life " in particular : '' It was copied 
far and wide. Young men read it with delight ; 



132 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

their hearts were stirred by it as by a bugle 
summons. . . . They did not stop to ask criti- 
cally whether or not it passed the line which 
separates poetry from preaching, or whether its 
didactic merit was a poetic defect. It was 
enough that it inspired them and enlarged their 
lives." Professors even of chemistry read it to 
their classes. Charles Sumner testified that he 
had a young classmate who was prevented from 
suicide by reading it. General Meredith Read 
tells a story of an old French lawyer whose 
mind was saved during the siege of Paris by 
translating it.^ Scarcely less need be said of 
that other psalm called " The Light of Stars " ; 
and the present writer at least can vividly testify 
what it was to him and his friends. It is worth 
remembering that the EngHsh reviewers of the 
day spoke of what they called the peculiarly 
** American tone" of such poems as these, 
counteracting the pessimism of older countries. 
Placed beside the inexhaustible depth of Brown- 
ing, the perfect execution of Tennyson, the 
absorbing passion of Rossetti, or the wonderful 
melodies of Swinburne, it is now easy to recog- 

1 " Life of Longfellow " by his brother, I. p. 271. 



LONGFELLOW I 33 

nize that such poetry as Longfellow's had its 
limitations, but it represented one whole side 
of life, and that in a way which undoubtedly 
gave him for many years the widest poetic audi- 
ence in the English-speaking world. Only last 
year I saw a volume of popular poetry, pub- 
lished for wide circulation in England, in which 
there were more poems by Longfellow than by 
all EngHsh-born poets put together. The trans- 
lations of these poems into fifteen languages 
tells the same story. The " Psalm of Life," for 
instance, has been rendered into Sanskrit, Chi- 
nese, and Marathi. Mere popularity is doubt- 
less a very secondary test, but where it shows 
that the quality of poems has entered into the 
people's life, it is not an element to be ignored. 

It is also to be noticed that Longfellow was 
to all Americans, at that time, one of the two 
prime influences through which the treasures 
of German literature, and especially of Ger- 
man romance, were opened to English readers. 
To this day nine-tenths of the Americans 
who visit Nuremberg and Heidelberg do it 
under the associations they have gained from 
Longfellow's prose or verse, and such travel- 



134 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

lers find in the latter city a German edition 
of the English text of " Hyperion " which 
they are wont to purchase at once and take 
with them to the castle. They visit every spot 
which has associations there, and I remember 
how indignant I was on finding the great tree 
described as waving over the Gesprengte Thurm 
was no longer there, but had shared the fate of 
the Chestnut Tree in "The Village Black- 
smith." Poets' trees, I had supposed, must be 
as immortal as their personal laurels. 

Professor Longfellow's diaries have been so 
frankly and sincerely edited by his brother 
that we see the personality of the man as in 
a glass, and also receive a vivid impression of 
his circle of companionship. It is a curious 
fact that while the details in this respect were 
criticised by London journals as being too 
profuse, — inasmuch as several persons were 
mentioned whose names were previously un- 
familiar to those particular critics, — they were 
criticised on the other hand in Germany as 
not suf^ciently minute for the more thorough 
and laborious German mind. In comparing 
these self-revelations with those given in the 



LONGFELLOW 135 

letters of Holmes and Lowell, one is struck 
with their far less brilliant and scintillating tone 
and, on the other hand, with their comparative 
evenness and equanimity. Never by any com- 
bination of circumstances do they exhibit 
jealousy, suspicion, or a petty solicitude for 
personal fame, though they may be said, on the 
other hand, sometimes to verge upon the trite 
or even commonplace. Yet they often have 
most felicitous touches, as where, for instance, 
Longfellow speaks of " The old dull pain that 
runs through all of Hawthorne's writings," or 

describes Captain as '' a fresh-looking, 

mellow, drum-voiced Englishman," and adds 
"we all look baked and dried in comparison;" 
or suggests that *'a charming essay might be 
written on the Perfect Stranger," meaning the 
man who is always writing to you " to turn his 
grindstone." ^ 

He sometimes gets very tired of people who 
send him large folios of poetry for " his private 
judgment," and once meditates on "the great 
importance it is to a literary man to remain 
unknown till he gets his work fairly done." 

1 "Life of Longfellow " by his brother, IL pp. 351, 362, 379. 



136 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

People moreover wrote to him to ask whether 
the youth in " Excelsior " died before he crossed 
the path; whether the poet's feelings were in 
sympathy with his thought when he wrote the 
poem of "The Bridge"; also who Evangeline 
was, to what country she belonged, and the place 
of her birth — a request which, his brother tells 
us, came in the same words one day from two 
different towns. In declining the request of a 
schoolgirl, he reports that he ''tried to say no 
so softly that she would think it better than 
fes." One correspondent wished for the de- 
tails of his life, and added, **try and fill a 
foolscap sheet." He wrote to one lady (De- 
cember 18, 1855), "I have sixty unanswered 
letters lying on my desk before me ; " and 
I myself saw, shortly before his death, a pile 
even larger than this, which had arrived that 
day from the pupils in the high schools of 
one western city. It must be owned that 
though his patience held out through all 
these trials, his strictness of judgment did 
not ; and that he, like all elderly poets, — 
Holmes and Whittier in particular, — found 
it very much easier to praise than blame. 



LONGFELLOW 1 37 

The late Mr. John S. Dwight, the leading 
musical critic of Boston, used to say that 
Longfellow's influence on the standard of 
music in that city had been pernicious, inas- 
much as he was always ready to head an in- 
vitation addressed to any new performer, 
however mediocre, who was asked to favor 
the public with a concert. In a thousand 
ways these diaries give indirect evidence of 
kindness, and he once said of an unworthy 
hanger-on, when reproached with being whee- 
dled, ''Who will be kind to him if I am not.'*" 
There are few finer instances in literature of 
generosity to an assailant than when he wrote 
to Poe after the latter's trivial and scurril- 
ous attacks, this answer to a propitiatory 
letter: "You are mistaken in supposing that 
you are 'not favorably known to me.' On 
the contrary, all that I have read from your 
pen has inspired me with a high idea ; and 
I think you are destined to stand among the 
first romance writers of the country, if such 
be your aim." ^ This was written May 19, 
1841, when Poe's "Tales of the Grotesque 

1 " Life of Longfellow " by his brother, I. p. 377. 



138 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

and the Arabesque " were published, but al- 
most unknown. 

He fared on the whole mildly with the critics, 
and the most serious charge made against him 
was, perhaps, that recorded by him as follows 
(February 6, 1846): "The Anti-Slavery papers 
attack me for leaving out the slavery poems in 
the illustrated edition. They are rather savage." 
This referred to an edition published by Hart 
in Philadelphia, November, 1845, and the omis- 
sion was due, his brother thinks, to ** a too good- 
natured concession to the expressed wish of the 
publishers." Several other instances of this 
good nature had occurred on the part of others, 
and the abolitionists could not easily ignore it. 
It is to be remembered, on the other hand, that 
these poems were all included in the cheap edi- 
tion published by Harper but a few months later 
(February, 1846), and that Longfellow might 
justly regard this as the one destined to reach 
the people. It is also to be recognized that 
these poems had been written when entirely 
alone, on a homeward voyage from Europe; 
that he did not personally know any of the 
abolitionists, and perhaps did not quite realize 



LONGFELLOW 1 39 

how important these productions were or how 
valuable was his example to the struggling band 
who were fighting slavery. Since Hart under- 
took at his own risk what was then regarded as 
an edition de luxe^ the poet may have felt that 
the daring publisher had a right to make his 
own selection. It must be remembered that 
Longfellow was nothing if not modest, and that 
his career of great success was really only 
beginning. The authors who had then made 
such successes were, as usual, those now for- 
gotten, a good type of these being a certain 
Professor J. H. Ingraham of whom Longfellow 
justly says, " I think he may say that he writes 
the worst novels ever written by anybody," 
though he got twelve hundred dollars for each of 
them, and wrote twenty a year. As time went 
on, Longfellow's poems were financially more 
profitable than some which were profounder, as 
those of Emerson ; and probably no American 
poet has been on the whole so well repaid in 
money, popularity, and in at least temporary 
fame. How permanent is to be the fame of 
any poet can never be predicted by his con- 
temporaries. 



140 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

He undoubtedly shared with Carlyle, whose 
miscellaneous essays were first collected and 
edited during this period by Charles Stearns 
Wheeler, another Cambridge instructor, the 
function of interpreting Germany to America. 
This he did first in *' Hyperion," and continued 
to do in his " Poets and Poetry of Europe " 
and his numerous translations. Few men, I 
suspect, have ever surpassed him as what may 
be called natural translators, proving it possible 
to produce versions that are both flexible and 
literal, sacrificing neither literalness to grace 
nor grace to literalness. Perhaps it could 
not actually be said of any of his translations, as 
has been justly said by critics of Mrs. Sarah 
Austin's exquisite rendering "Many a Year 
is in its Grave," that it was better than the 
original, yet he sometimes came very near to 
this, and his widely recognized fame in this re- 
spect was of great value to the University. His 
influence was always thrown, of course, on the 
side of the elective system, yet he often writes 
in his diary such expressions as this : " It is 
pleasant to teach in college, yet it has grown 
wearisome to me." " Ah, would that I had not 



LONGFELLOW I41 

all this college tackle hanging round me." "A 
day of hard work. Six hours in the recitation 
room — like a schoolmaster ! It is pleasant 
enough when the mind gets engaged in it, but 
— Art is long and life is short." Then there 
are such summaries of a year as this : " How 
barren of all poetic production, and even prose 
production, this last year has been! For 1853 
I have absolutely nothing to show. Really, 
there has been nothing but the college work. 
The family absorbs half the time; and letters 
and visits take out a huge cantle." Lowell's 
letters are full of similar complaints, more im- 
pulsively made, and relieved by countless jokes 
against himself. The difference was that Long- 
fellow's more even temperament made him 
more methodical and orderly, and also more 
chary of self-expression, so that although he 
might be as much bored with his work, his 
pupils would find it out less readily. Indeed, 
Lowell's pupils discovered it easily enough. He 
yawned occasionally on entering the room, an 
act of which the ever courteous Longfellow 
would have been incapable, as he would also of 
a certain cynical tone by which Lowell some- 



142 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

times relieved himself. Certainly in my time — 
ten years before the period of Longfellow's 
complaints mentioned above — there were no 
visible indications of weariness on his part ; in 
fact, he would have generally been pronounced 
the least sleepy of our professors. 

I had the good fortune to study French under 
him, not in a general recitation room, but in 
what was called the Corporation Room, where 
we sat round a long table as if guests at his 
board. His lectures, which were to us most 
interesting, were sometimes criticised as too 
flowery by our elders, who had perhaps been 
accustomed to gather only dried fruit ; and I re- 
member how he fixed in our memories the vivid 
moral of any French books that happened to be 
provided with that appendage, as for instance 
" Le Peau de Chagrin " of Balzac. I remember 
also with delight when a printer's boy once came 
in and laid down between the Professor and my- 
self the proof-sheet of a title-page bearing the 
magic words "Voices of the Night." It was as 
if I had seen a new planet in process of making. 

Longfellow was, I think, the first Harvard 
professor who addressed his pupils as " Mr.," a 



LONGFELLOW 1 43 

practice now very general. I have told else- 
where how, when he undertook to address us in 
the evening in the college yard during what he 
called in his diary a "silly and boyish outbreak," 
— called by the students a rebellion, — he 
was Hstened to when other professors had been 
silenced, and this under the cry : " We will hear 
Professor Longfellow. He always treats us 
like gentlemen." He was indeed, undoubtedly, 
at this time, the best model of manners among 
all the professors, but it was sometimes felt that 
his courtesy had a little background of re- 
serve, not easily surmounted. Young people 
demand not merely kindliness from their elders, 
but perhaps a little exuberance, and are some- 
times as much checked by the absence of this 
secondary supply of cordiality as by coldness of 
first greeting. Professor Longfellow never was 
cold, but on the other hand he was never quite 
warm ; and I sometimes thought that Professor 
Peirce, the mathematician, who rarely answered 
our greetings in the street, yet was all frank- 
ness if he happened to speak to us, was more 
thoroughly winning to juveniles than the uni- 
formly courteous but more distant Longfellow. 



144 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

The point where this underlying stratum of cool- 
ness came in superbly was in his feeling toward 
critics, who were absolutely powerless to hurt 
him. He rarely read their attacks, though he 
had a habit of preserving them ; and the really 
outrageous assaults of Poe, for instance, fell off 
from him as from a marble statue. He was 
for the last dozen years of his life distinctly 
the First Citizen of Cambridge. He was always 
faithful to all public duties, seldom failed to vote 
or to contribute to all legitimate local needs, 
was known to sight by everybody, and when the 
children of Cambridge subscribed to give him an 
armchair from the wood of the Chestnut Tree, 
he laid it down as a rule that every child who 
wished to see the chair again should be admitted 
without objection; a privilege which was long 
used by hundreds who thronged the door to the 
despair of his family. He said on his seventy- 
fourth birthday that it seemed as if the two 
numerals ought to exchange places, but died 
after one more anniversary, on March 24, 1882, 
having been, as has been said, more continu- 
ously and permanently identified with the life 
of Cambridge than had been either of her 
native-born poets. 



V 
LOWELL 



LOWELL 

Of the three authors most widely associated 
with Old Cambridge, only Holmes and Lowell 
were born there, although its associations be- 
came a second nature to Longfellow, who was 
born in Maine, while that region was still a 
part of Massachusetts. 

Lowell felt, even more thoroughly than 
Holmes, the influence of his Cambridge sur- 
roundings, because Holmes went to Europe 
for his medical training (1833) at the age of 
twenty-three and never afterward lived in his 
native town, though always near it; while 
Lowell was continuously a Cantabrigian, with 
only occasionally a few months of absence, 
until his first diplomatic appointment. Fred- 
rika Bremer told him that he was the only 
American she had seen whose children were 
born in the same house with himself ; and he 
was also of the yet smaller number who die in 
147 



148 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

the house of their birth. It would be impos- 
sible to say that the Cambridge influence en- 
tered more strongly into Lowell than into 
Holmes, but it was in Lowell's case less con- 
centrated upon early years and more distrib- 
uted over his life. One of his most attractive 
traits was his passionate love of his birthplace, 
and although Matthew Arnold pitied him for 
being obliged to return to it from London, he 
was really nowhere else so happy. This could 
not have been the case had not the residence 
been fortunate in itself. 

Multitudes of persons now visit Elmwood 
every year, and there are few who do not feel 
its charm. Yet this affords no picture of what 
the region was in Lowell's day, when the whole 
road connecting it with ** the village " was 
merely dotted here and there with other stately 
colonial houses like itself. On Mt. Auburn 
Street, then called ''the New Road," there was 
no house whatever until the village was nearly 
reached; and even on Brattle Street the south 
side was houseless until the old Vassall House 
blocked the way. It was the region not merely, 
as Professor Norton says, of ** pasture land or 



LOWELL 149 

mowing which afforded good roaming ground 
for schoolboys," but also one where orchards 
bore that rather tart fruit which schoolboys 
most enjoy. 

Along Brattle Street the gallants of Revolu- 
tionary days had in Lowell's phrase " creaked 
up and down on red-heeled shoes, lifting the 
ceremonious three-cornered hat and offering 
the fugacious hospitalities of the snuff-box." 
The Baroness Riedesel had described their 
delightful society in 1780; all the families were 
more or less connected, and most of them had 
slave plantations in the West Indies. She says : 
" Never had I chanced upon such an agree- 
able situation. Seven families, who were con- 
nected with each other, partly by the ties of 
relationship and partly by affection, had here 
farms, gardens, and magnificent houses, and 
not far off plantations of fruit. The owners of 
these were in the habit of daily meeting each 
other in the afternoons, — now at the house of 
one, and now at another, and making them- 
selves merry with music and the dance, — living 
in prosperity, united and happy, until, alas ! 
this ruinous war severed them, and left all their 



I50 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

houses desolate, except two, the proprietors of 
which were also soon obliged to flee." 

These seven houses were those of General 
William Brattle, Colonel John Vassall, Mrs. Pe- 
nelope, widow of Colonel Henry Vassall, Rich- 
ard Lechmere (afterward Jonathan Sewall), 
Judge Joseph Lee, Captain George Ruggles 
(afterward Thomas Fayerweather), and Lieu- 
tenant Thomas Oliver. Of their homes, the 
Lechmere House was that occupied by Madame 
Riedesel; the John Vassall House was the 
Craigie House, afterward owned by Longfel- 
low, and now occupied by his eldest daughter ; 
the Oliver House was owned by Lowell, and is 
now occupied by his grandchildren; the Brat- 
tle House was occupied at one time by Mar- 
garet Fuller; the Ruggles House was owned by 
William Wells, when Lowell went to his school, 
and now belongs as part owner to his grandson 
WilUams Wells Newell, founder and editor of 
the American Folk-Lore Journal . It is now some- 
what difficult for the passers-by to select these 
seven houses amid the multitude of more re- 
cent structures ; but they all belonged distinctly 
to the colonial type, and six out of the seven 



LOWELL 



151 



have, as has been seen, some literary associa- 
tions. It would be impossible to find elsewhere 
in America, and hard to select anywhere, a 
series of houses in this respect so notable.^ 

It was past this row of houses that Lowell 
walked daily or rode on his little pony to the 
village post-office ; and it was not possible that 
a child of naturally imaginative turn should 
escape their influence. It was too soon after 
the American Revolution — then only fifty years 
removed — for him to feel any cordial sympathy 
or envy for the period of hair powder and snuff- 
boxes ; but the boy who was already immersing 
himself in the traditions of EngHsh poetry, had 
the actual form of the British occupation of New 
England vividly before his eyes. 

Lowell may have also found, in the garrets 
of his father's house, such memorials of the 
confiscation of the estate as in the following 

1 " Mrs. Oliver was sister to Vassall, and Mrs. Vassall was 
sister to Oliver. The deceased father of Vassall and Mrs. 
Oliver was brother to Mrs. Ruggles and to the deceased husband 
of the widow Vassall, and the deceased mother of Vassall and 
Mrs. Oliver was sister to Mrs. Lechmere and Mrs. Lee. The 
widow Vassall was also aunt to Mr. Oliver and to John Vassall's 
wife." Paige's " History of Cambridge," p. 168, note. 



152 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

account, kept at the height of the great Revo- 
lution : — 

Dr. The estate of Thomas Oliver, late of Cambridge, 
Absentee, to the Committee of Correspondence 
of the town, for the year 1776 : 

For taking into possession and leas- 
ing out said estate . . , £1. 

Also for supporting a negro man 

belonging to said estate . . ;^3.i2 

For collecting the personal estate . £2>' 

Cr. By cash received as rent . * £^- 

The circumstances which led Thomas Oliver 
to become an " absentee " must often have 
been told and retold to the boy Lowell by 
the evening fire. On September 2, 1774, there 
had been a great gathering in Cambridge from 
all parts of Middlesex County to protest against 
the assumption of power by which the Gov- 
erning Council of the Colony should be ap- 
pointed by the crown and not by the General 
Court or Legislature. Several thousand men 
were gathered round the court-house steps, 
and among them rose at last two of the newly 
appointed King's Councillors, Judge Danforth 
and Judge Lee, and announced amid applause 



LOWELL 153 

that they had declined the appointment. The 
mob then marched to the house of a third of 
these Councillors, Lieutenant-governor Oliver, 
who was less pliable, but at last came forth 
— "a dapper little man," by contemporary 
testimony — and gave in his written resigna- 
tion in these words, " My house at Cambridge 
being surrounded by about four thousand peo- 
ple, in compliance with their command I resign 
my office." Then, and not till then, the crowd 
dispersed. It was in this house, nearly fifty 
years later, that Lowell was born (Feb. 22, 18 19). 
Lowell's name was already familiar to me 
at nine years of age through the school 
narratives of an elder brother of mine, long 
since dead, whose immediate classmate he 
was, and all whose comrades were to me of 
course as gifted and eminent as the heroes 
of the Trojan War. My brother was large 
and strong, being, indeed, the "big boy" of 
the school, and held among the pupils the 
honorary title of Daddy. He protected me 
against my ruder schoolmates and against the 
** town-boys," who were sometimes combative; 
and I think he occasionally protected Lowell 



154 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

also, who was small and slight. Lowell was 
not then a handsome boy, but he had very fine 
eyes and that Apollo look about the brow 
which lighted up a somewhat heavy face. He 
and I, with my brother and William Story, 
afterward eminent as a sculptor, had the hap- 
piness to be the only day scholars ; for the 
school, although by no means one of the Dothe- 
boys Hall type, was yet emphatically of the 
" Early EngHsh " style, the boys being ruled 
by a pretty strenuous birch during school 
hours, and at other times left herded together 
with little supervision. Story was already the 
intimate friend of Lowell, and rather took 
the lead of him, being then the Steerforth of 
the school, joyous, full of life, and variously 
accomplished. Many a time I have walked 
up and down what is now Brattle Street, lis- 
tening reverently to the talk of these older boys, 
not always profitable, but sometimes most 
valuable. I remember, for instance, their talk- 
ing over the plot of Spenser's ** Faerie Queene" 
years before I had read it, and making it so 
interesting that we younger urchins soon 
named a nook with shady apple trees near 



LOWELL 155 

our bathing place on Charles River the " Bower 
of Blisse." 

In 1834 Lowell and Story went to college, 
and my brother afterward to the East Indies, so 
I was dropped from their circle, except as a 
boy in a college town watches the works and 
ways of the students. Both Lowell and Story 
were popular and socially brilliant in college, 
but neither gave unmixed satisfaction to the 
Faculty. Both were of the kind who read old 
EngHsh plays a good deal, and of the rarer 
number who get some good out of them. 
Lowell's reputation as a wit was established in 
the editorship of Harvardiana, as Holmes's had 
been ten years earlier in The Collegian^ though 
Lowell's contributions were mainly in prose. 
After entering college myself in 1837, I began 
to meet him as an older man in Cambridge 
society, where he was again eclipsed in imme- 
diate prestige by Story, than whom there has 
never been a more varied Admirable Crichton, 
at least in that little world. Story was hand- 
some, fearless, audacious, overflowing with 
spirits, good at everything, — singing, acting, 
sketching, caricaturing. But if he was the 



156 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

social leader, Lowell was perhaps the class 
favorite. He wrote the songs for their convivial 
occasions, one of which, and certainly not the 
most dignified, has been preserved by Dr. Hale 
in his " Recollections." He kept the rhymed 
records of the Hasty Pudding Club, but in later 
life requested, quite to the disapproval of the im- 
mediate members, to be permitted to cut them 
out of the record book, which he did. Mr. F. B. 
Sanborn, when he succeeded to the office of sec- 
retary of this club, read these " smooth and trivial 
verses," as he calls them, "with avidity and 
some disappointment," and thinks that Lowell 
may perhaps have printed some of them in 
Harvardiana. He was afterward chosen class 
poet, but was prevented from delivering his 
poem by being suspended from college at the 
very close of the senior year. The explanation 
usually given of this makes it the result of neg- 
Hgence in college duties, and there may very 
probably have been a background of this de- 
scription ; but the immediate cause of it, as I well 
remember, was an unlucky performance of his 
in prayer-time, perhaps more severely construed 
by the faculty, but doubtless simply due to that 



LOWELL 15;? 

overpowering exuberance of boyish spirits which 
lasted for many years with him, alternating with 
periods of depression. The best sketch of this 
little incident may be found in a letter, not 
before published, addressed to me by an emi- 
nent clergyman, lately deceased. 



June 28, 1893. 

... I was a sophomore, and sat half a dozen seats 
directly behind him. He came in as usual — it was the 
day he had been chosen class poet, by one or two votes 
(I think) over my cousin John Ware — and seemed to re- 
gard the occasion as wholly complimentary to himself. 
His handsome face was richly suffused with the purple 
glow of youth, and wreathed in smiles, as he rose, — my 
venerable grandfather [Rev. Henry Ware, D.D.] had with 
trembling voice just begun the service, — and bowed, 
smirking right hand and left, to the surprised congregation. 
It was the aifair of a minute : my recollection is that he 
was soon persuaded to sit down, and only made one more 
ineffectual attempt to rise. The short service — it was 
evening prayer, of course — went through and ended de- 
cently and in order. Presumably, "Old Quin" [Presi- 
dent Quincy] was in his customary seat, and had a fair 
view of the proceedings. We soon learned that it had 
been dealt with quite seriously ; by what seemed a hard 
sentence, he had been suspended till after class day. I 
suppose the date must have been March or April [1838], 
but am not sure. 



158 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

The Class Poem was afterward printed anony- 
mously, to which fact, perhaps, may be partly 
due its present scarcity and high price. It will 
always have an interest, not merely as Lowell's 
first serious poetic effort, but as indicating that 
curious conservatism of his mind — far beyond 
his father's — which led him to speak with 
aversion both of Emerson and of the abolition- 
ists, afterward his friends. It gave him, how- 
ever, a distinct feeling of having tried his wings 
in song, and of being destined thenceforth to 
that realm. It was a year or two after this 
that my elder brother, having lately returned 
from Calcutta, and having gone promptly to 
spend an evening with his old friend, came 
home with an astounding bit of information. 
** Jimmie Lowell," he said, — this being his 
friend's usual appellation in those days, — 
"thinks he is going to be a poet." The an- 
nouncement was received by my elders in the 
family with some disapproval. Cambridge had 
produced one poet in Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
but he was also a reputable physician, and 
relied at that time far more upon his medical 
than his literary reputation; but Lowell was 



LOWELL 159 

not yet even a lawyer ; and for a poet pure and 
simple the world of our small academic village 
seemed to hold no opening. Nevertheless the 
announcement was heard with delight by one 
faithful and trusting auditor, who took the 
young bard at his own valuation. It never 
seems improbable to a boy that any one of his 
elder schoolmates should turn out a phoenix. 
That this purpose of a poetic career was then 
distinctly formed, I learned from Lowell him- 
self, who told me that he planned at that time 
a regular study of the laws of English verse, 
mentioning to me several of his favorite man- 
uals, as Sidney's " Defence of Poesie," and Put- 
tenham's "Art of English Poesie." For some 
reason not known to me, Lowell was accredited 
to Boston in the Harvard catalogues during his 
senior year and his three years of study in the 
Law School, but it is probable that his father 
then resided in Boston, while his elder brother, 
Charles Russell Lowell, occupied Elmwood. 

The great and even controlling influence ex- 
ercised upon Lowell from this time by his be- 
trothed, Maria White, who afterward became 
his wife, is well known, and the simplicity of 



l60 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

their daily life is well portrayed in the follow- 
ing extracts from a sort of diary communi- 
cated by Lowell about the year 1849 to his 
friend, Charles F. Briggs, of New York, who 
then edited Holden's Magazine. By a letter 
from Briggs to R. W. Griswold^ it would ap- 
pear that he was in charge of it in January, 
1850, which must have been about the time of 
this letter. There is not, I think, in all Mr. 
Norton's delightful collection of Lowell's cor- 
respondence anything quite so thoroughly local, 
or giving so close a glimpse of "Old Cam- 
bridge." The editor's preface is as follows : — 

"A Pepysian Letter. — Just as we had 
taken up our pen to go on with our topics, we 
received a letter from a Down East correspon- 
dent, so full of Pepysian anecdote, provincial 
gossip, and humane satire, that we cannot re- 
sist the temptation to overstep all the bounds of 
delicacy and give it to the world entire. Why 
should we selfishly wrap in our napkin such a 
piece of enjoyable good nature as this } By the 
way, we might as well give warning to our sev- 

1 " Letters of R. W. Griswold," p. 257. 



LOWELL l6l 

eral private correspondents that, if they will 
write us such capital letters, they must not 
think of falling out with us if we do put them 
in print. We have conscientious scruples about 
keeping for our own enjoyment anything which 
we know would give pleasure to others. We 
have taken the liberty to erase the names be- 
cause they are those of people who are too 
well known to allow of any other kind of liber- 
ties being taken with them." 

Then follows the letter. 

" The keeper of the station near us is a Mr. 
S., father of a wonderful boy of whom you 
may have seen notices. He is an excellent 
specimen of the Yankee, civil, intelligent, able 
to write a good account of Secretary C. [Colla- 
mer] in our village newspaper, nasal enough, 
has his own opinions on men and books — opin- 
ions on a far higher plane than common. He 
is from Vermont, knows P.'s [Powers] family 
* wal,' and thus confuted to me one day a story 
he had seen translated from the Italian, to the 
effect that P. was born * in the little hamlet of 
Woodstock, inhabited altogether by herdsmen 
and shepherds.' 'Why,' said he, *I lived 



1 62 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

within a stone's chuck o* the haouse he wuz 
born in. Knew his uncle Dr. P., wal. Still 
livin'. There's five ministers o' the gospil, 
twelve doctors, and seventeen liars (lawyers) 
these I know certin, and I guess there's much's 
forty piano fortes there, too.' Not a bad scale 
of civilization, this, though new to me. What I 
was going to tell, though, was something that 
took place this morning. He is a reader of 

— especially quoad the , which refresh 

him hugely, and always has something to say 
when he sees me. He is amazingly proud of 
his son, (a weakness you and I could pardon 
were it a daughter) and properly so, for the 
boy is not like other mathematical prodigies, 
but has great parts in other respects. This 
morning he showed me a calculation of the 
boy's, with regard to the orbit of some comet or 
other, covering many sheets of paper wafered 
together — about eight feet of it in all. 

" M. [Maria Lowell] — ' He is fifteen years 
old .? ' 

" S. — * No, ma'am, he ain't but jest gut into 
his fourteenth year.' 

" M. — * When did he do this .? * 



LOWELL 163 

" S. — (You see it is a matter of pride with 
the father to keep him young. Every year sub- 
tracts so much from his claim to prodigyship. 
Accordingly the 'jest' in the last sentence 
was prolonged thus — ^ je-e-e-st ' — to express 
that he had barely reached fourteen, -and that 
somehow he ought to have kept thirteen.) 
* Wal, ma'am, he might a'finished it in his thir- 
teenth year. But he took a notion to read a 
book. I told him he better finish it up the 
night before he come fourteen, and he might 
ez wal's nut. But he didn't — 'twuz (answering 
a look of M.'s) a pity ! ' 

"You understand that his finishing it that 
night (though in fact it would have been but 
the gain of an hour or two) would have made a 
difference of a whole year in favor of the father 
when he told the story. A pretty little touch 
of nature, isn't it.? 

"You write me news from the great city 
and I send you in return our metropolitanisms. 
While I am telling stories, here is another. 
Said my father the other day to an old widow, 
one of his parish poor, * God has not deserted 
you in your old age.' * No, sir, / have a very 



1 64 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

good appetite still,' thus indicating clearly that 
she was one of those who made a god of their 
belly. Yet, if she had said ' digestion,' I could 
have gone along with her. The Jews were 
always a rebellious people, yet no rebellion of 
theirs was ever so mischievous as that of the 
gastric Jews. We owe to it ill-temper and 
Byronic poetry — two of the greatest pests of 
society." 

[He then proceeds to describe his habitual 
demeanor in Boston.] 

"This letter is written diary-wise. When I 
left off I was at the railway station. Imagine 
us now safely arrived in B — [Boston]. When 
there, I always maintain punctiliously the char- 
acter of a country gentleman. We trail along 
the sidewalk, stopping at all the shop windows 
to look at prints, caricatures, rifles, silverware, 
muslins, books, goldfish, toys, and what not. 
Perhaps I go over all the shop windows again, 
or I walk down to the end of Long Wharf — the 
only part of the city that I loved when a boy 
— or I walk through Ann Street, (sadly changed 
now, and invaded by granite blocks,) or round 
by Copp's Hill, where the primitive pre-revolu- 



LOWELL 165 

tionary B — [Boston] still persists, and where 
old people live who think our Independence of 
Britain a mistake, — or I go up to look at the new- 
Athenaeum, the library room in which is finished 
and is the handsomest I ever saw. Through all 
the varied scenes I continue to represent the 
country interest, — my pockets have, no doubt, 
been explored by the inquisitive fingers of pro- 
fessional gentlemen from New York over and 
over again. Probably they know me by this 
time, and look upon me as no better than a 
Sodom apple. Perhaps they continue their 
investigations from habit, as Jonathan Wild 
used to sound the pockets of Count La Ruse, 
though he knew that there was nothing in them. 
Then I meet M., and loading myself with her 
various bundles we find our way to the station 
again, and * so home,' as Pepys says. 

" So much for Wednesday. Thursday morn- 
ing I went after some pear trees I had bought, 
and set them out. During the rest of the morn- 
ing I employed myself in scraping trees. After 
dinner scraped more. After tea sit down to 
write my article for the vS — [Anti-Slavery 
Standard\. Got half through a prose one, 



1 66 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

when, just as the church bells are ringing nine 
o'clock, the idea of a poem strikes me. Go to 
work on that at once. Finish it next morning 
all but the few last stanzas. In the afternoon 
(Friday) go to C — [Cambridge, i.e. the village] 
to get one thing and another for our whist club, 
which meets with me to-night. Play whist till 
12. J. H. [John Holmes] (who is lame) spends 
the night with me. Next day finish and copy 
my verses. Got all done just in time to pre- 
vent the mail. After dinner drove J. home. 
Evening, read Swift, that hog of letters, who 
had wit enough to know the worth of pearls, 
though fonder of garbage and of rooting among 
ordure." 

[We soon come to the creation of the Town 
and Country Club.] 

" Now it is Sunday morning and here I am 
with you. Since I wrote to you, the 'Town 
and Country Club ' has been got up. Our first 
regular meeting is next Wednesday, (2d May,) 
when E. [Emerson] is to read an address. The 
Club is a singular agglomeration. All persons 
whom other folks think crazy, and who return 
the compliment, belong to it. It is as if all the 



LOWELL 167 

eccentric particles which had refused to revolve 
in the regular routine of the world's orbit, and 
had flowed off in different directions, had come 
together to make a planet of their own. Plenty 
of fine luminous matter there is, though. One 
thing is certain, it fitly represents the extreme 
gauche. The discussions in regard to a name 
were rather droll. A. [Alcott], whose orbit 
never, even by chance, intersects the plane of 
the modern earth, proposed that we should call 
ourselves * Olympians.' Upon this I suggested 
to W. H. C. [Channing] who sat next to me, (and 
who seemed unconscious that I was not per- 
fectly serious,) that, as the Club was composed 
chiefly of Apostles of the Newness, and as we 
hoped to aid in crushing some monsters, we 
should call ourselves (if we must be antique) 
the Club of Hercules. A. meanwhile, finding 
that his Olympian tack met with a headwind, 
wore ship and proposed * Pan ' as perhaps sim- 
pler and more accessible to the ordinary intel- 
lect. Hereupon, I again modestly suggested 
that, as we were to have a cafe annexed, or to 
annex ourselves to a cafe, the name Coffee-pot 
would be apter than Pan, unless we prefixed 



1 68 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

thereto the distinguishing christen-name of 
Patty. 

"E. [Emerson] has changed a good deal 
since his visit to England. He has become — 
not at all more worldly — but more of this 
world. The practical sense of John Bull 
seems to have impressed him, and he is re- 
solved to be practical too. His lecture on 
England was not good, for him. There was 
one thing in it that especially pleased me. 
He did not even allude to the people. His 
favorite theory (you know) is the highest 
culture of the individual. He would think a 
nation well wasted if it brought one man to 
perfection. Accordingly his whole view was 
of the upper class — their beauty, their pluck, 
their fine persons, their healthiness, &c. The 
people he clearly regarded as the dung for 
those fine plants. I was pleased with this, 
because it was natural to E., and because we 
have enough who profess to see nothing but 
the people. It was wholesome to have the 
other side also presented. Yet the lecture, as 
a whole, gave me limited satisfaction and 
taught me nothing. E. dwells so habitually 



LOWELL 169 

in a world of his own that when he comes 
down into the real and practical (everything 
being strange to him), he notices mimitice 
that would escape the habituated vision, and 
his remarks accordingly have wonderful fresh- 
ness and point. But in going to England, 
which was as unfamiliar to the eyes of other 
travellers as to his own, he has reported things 
which we had already heard many times. I 
heard the lecture at our Cambridge Lyceum, 
and, as his diction was somewhat peculiar, I 
was much amused by watching the audience. 
I saw one worthy joiner repeatedly and vig- 
orously scratching the outside of his head in 
the hope of exciting a corresponding vivacity 
within — but he at last gave it up as useless. 
A new edition of E.'s works is to appear with 
a portrait. C. [Cheney] is to draw it, which 
I am sorry for. His heads are always grace- 
ful and spiritual, but they are wanting in that 
punctilious veracity which gives to a portrait 
its whole worth. Yet he gives the expression 
of the person quite wonderfully. I went to 
his room once, some half a dozen years ago, 
and saw, among other heads, one of a little 



I/O OLD CAMBRIDGE 

boy. After looking at it, and feeling myself 
drawn to it in a peculiar and inexplicable 
manner, I said to C, ' I never saw the original 
of that drawing, but I am certain from the 
expression of the eyes, that that boy (whoever 
he is) is of my kith and kin.' It turned out 
to be a son (whom I had never seen,) of a 
cousin of mine. 

"L. [Longfellow] has an excellent crayon 
drawing of E. by a down-easter named 
J. [Eastman Johnson]. It is the only tolera- 
ble head of him I ever saw. I am sorry it 
should not be engraved. L. has also a capi- 
tal head of H. [Hawthorne] by the same 
artist. 

*'In regard to the proposed collection of 
my poems, the case stands thus. Two of my 
volumes are stereotyped and I own the plates. 
I intend to have such parts as I care to pre- 
serve stereotyped also and add them to the 
smaller volume, making two good-sized ones. 
As for my portrait, let that come hereafter 
when I am older and wiser or dead." 

[He soon reverts to his nursery ballads, 
never before printed.] 



LOWELL 171 

'' I copy below one of my latest poems. I 
have attempted to complete a fine old-ballad 
fragment, how successfully you must judge. 
It has been very popular with the small pub- 
lic for whom it was specially intended. 

" Lady Bird, lady bird, fly away home ! 
Your house is on fire, your children will burn ! 
Send for the engines, and send for the men, 
Perhaps we can put it out agen ; 
Send for the ladders, and send for the hose, 
Perhaps we can put it out, nobody knows ; 
Sure, nobody's case was ever sadder. 
To the nursery-window clap the ladder. 
If they are there, and not done brown. 
They'll open the window and hopple down ! 

" Thus far, you perceive, the material in- 
stinct gets the upper hand, but now the Lady 
Bird arrives at the scene of desolation, and 
the house-keeping qualities of mind are elec- 
trified into morbid activity. The word * hop- 
ple' is finely local, being in the Mab dialect. 
It means to scramble down confusedly. 

" Splish, splash ! fizz and squirt ! 
All my things ruined with water and dirt, 
All my new carpets torn to flinders, 
Trodden in with mud and cinders! 



172 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

My mirrors smashed, my bedsteads racked, 
My company tea-set chipped and cracked ! 
Save my child — my carpets and chairs, 
And I'll give you leave to burn my heirs, 
They are little six-legged, spotted things, 
If they have any sense, they'll use their wings ; 
If they have any sense, they'll use their legs, 
Or, at worst, it is easy to lay more eggs. 

''This, you observe, teaches children not 
to value themselves too highly, to respect 
crockery and varnish, and to cultivate self- 
reliance." 

The copious letters v/ritten by Lowell to 
Charles F. Briggs, and printed in full by Pro- 
fessor Norton, recall to me the answer of the 
once noted New York author, Henry T. 
Tuckerman, when I asked him how it was 
that Lowell gained applause so easily, while 
so many had to wait for it. The explanation 
is very easy, said Tuckerman, " Lowell had 
an admirer." This admirer was Briggs, whose 
preservation in the amber of the "Fable for 
Critics " has not sufficed to keep his memory 
green, and who undoubtedly left no opportunity 
unused to celebrate Lowell's youthful genius. 

Lowell's personal popularity at this time, 



LOWELL 173 

though great, was not universal. He was, as 
Willis said, "the best-launched poet of his 
time," but this early success was not altogether 
beneficial. He was secretly over-sensitive, pen- 
sive, given to anxiety and despair, all of which 
is plainly visible in his letters ; and yet he was 
sometimes charged with arrogance, or at least 
with being self-absorbed and monopolizing. As 
Sir Lucius O'Trigger says, there was "an air 
of success about him that was mighty provok- 
ing." The influence of his wife scarcely tem- 
pered this, for she saw always his nobler side, 
and met his impassioned poetry with strains as 
ardent. She loved him, as she wrote, — 

For that great soul whose breath so full and rare 
Doth to humanity a blessing bear, 
Flooding its dreary waste with organ tone. 

That side was undoubtedly the true Lowell; 
yet it must be remembered that it was a 
time, in American literature, of defiant and 
vehement mutual criticism. Poe was disfigur- 
ing the press with the bitterness and scurrilous 
quality of his attacks ; it was thought a fine 
thing to impale somebody, to make somebody 



174 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

writhe, to get even with somebody, and it was 
hard for younger men to keep clear of this flat- 
tering temptation. Years before the founding 
of the Atlantic Monthly^ Lowell once described 
to Thaxter and myself, at the Isles of Shoals, 
an imaginary magazine which he would like 
to edit : " We will have in it," he said, " a 
department headed by a vignette representing 
a broom ; and in that we will in each number 
sweep some pretender out of existence. Then, 
having done it, we would stand by it, and if 
we had made a mistake and killed a young 
Keats we would never acknowledge it." This 
project so dwelt in his mind that he mentioned 
it again to Mr. Sanborn twenty years after 
in regard to the Atlantic Monthly. This 
method had already been illustrated by his treat- 
ment in the " Fable for Critics " of Margaret 
Fuller and Professor Francis Bowen; and it 
naturally did not soften the friends of these 
victims, when, on becoming himself a member 
of the Harvard Faculty, he struck out the 
references to Bowen, but left the other un- 
touched, even after the noble Italian career 
and pathetic death of Madame Ossoli. Yet 



LOWELL 175 

much of this earlier bitterness was at the 
very time (1845) when he wrote to his friend 
Briggs, *' I go out sometimes with my heart so 
full of yearning toward my fellows that the in- 
different look with which even entire strangers 
pass me brings tears into my eyes." Strange 
that the very man who wrote thus should 
take pleasure in pulverizing into atoms an 
author so shy and secluded as Percival. 

There is something curiously interesting to 
the student of human nature in the rapid tran- 
sition, in Lowell's case, from the writer of 
decidedly convivial class songs to the man 
addressing, four years later,^ the annual meet- 
ing of the Cambridgeport Washington Total 
Abstinence Society. It was about this time 
that his father said of him, in reference to his 
preferring to walk up and down the piazza 
during family prayers, " James is not serious, as 
yet, but he has a good heart, and is a foe to 
every mortal wrong." Ten years later yet, on 
my inviting him to attend the Whole World's 
Temperance Convention in New York, at which 
I was to preside, he returned the following 
rather guarded answer : — 

1 Lowell's " Letters," I. p. 68. 



176 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

August 31, 1853. 

My dear Sir, — I should not have the least notion how 
to address the Whole World's Convention even if I had 
anything to say to them. I can only declare that I sym- 
pathize heartily with any movement that shall promote 
temperance or shall elevate man or woman socially or 
morally. The How must be left to the care of individual 
experience. 

Among the good things of the day, let me thank you for 
your pamphlet on the Woman question, which I read with 
great interest ; and which is the most compact and telling 
statement of the case I have seen. 

We have no intention whatever of going abroad again 
at present. The climate of Italy, I think, did Mrs. Lowell 
great good, but she is not well enough now to think of 
leaving home. 

I am glad you liked Maria's poem. Two others of hers 
have been published in Putnam, " Necklaces," and " The 
Grave of Keats." They are all beautiful, / think, and the 
greatest pleasure I am capable of is to hear them ap- 
preciated. With sincere regard, 

I remain yours, 

J. R. Lowell. 

This was written just two months before 
Maria Lowell's death, and there does not exist 
in literature, I think, a more exquisite expres- 
sion of the possible union between two thor- 
oughly poetic natures. It was, however, a 
curious influence of her death that, instead of 



LOWELL 1 77 

its making him a stronger reformer in the lines 
into which she had guided him, the effect 
seemed rather to lie the other way. "The 
natural Tory " ^ in him, as he described an 
innate instinct to Hughes, in 1874, seemed 
to come uppermost; her death made him a 
recluse, and he appeared to shrink from all asso- 
ciations that recalled her memory too keenly. 
For a few years he allowed his name to remain 
on the list of vice-presidents of the Anti-Slavery 
Society, but that was all. During the long 
period of the fugitive slave cases, the Kansas 
troubles, and the John Brown excitement, I can 
remember nothing that seemed to identify him 
seriously with the party of agitation, except that 
once, on meeting me when I was under indict- 
ment after the Anthony Burns affair, in 1854, 
he put his hand on my head, and said, rather 
approvingly, "This is a traitor's head." Per- 
haps he only did it on the general principle 
announced by Scott in " Rob Roy," that treason 
has been in all ages accounted the crime of a 
gentleman. I have since learned from Mr. F. 
B. Sanborn that Lowell thought of recalling 

1 Lowell's " Letters," I. p. 136. 

N 



178 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

Hosea Biglow to the scene and of sending him 
to Kansas ; and from the moment when he took 
the helm of the Atlantic Monthly, in 1857, he 
was felt to be on deck again. His early papers 
in that magazine helped to lead public opinion 
more than any others of the time, and he 
lavished in the cause all his treasures of wit and 
memory. To whom but Lowell would it have 
occurred to write by way of illustration, " Lord 
de Roos, long suspected of cheating at cards, 
would never have been convicted but for the 
resolution of an adversary, who, pinning his 
hand to the table with a fork, said to him, 
blandly, 'My lord, if the ace of spades is not 
under your lordship's hand, why then I beg 
your pardon.' It seems to us that a timely 
treatment of Governor Letcher in the same 
energetic way would have saved the disasters 
of Harper's Ferry and Norfolk." And he was 
one of the first to proclaim publicly, while Mr. 
Seward was still trying to keep the question of 
slavery wholly out of the affair : ** We cannot 
think that the war we are entering on can end 
without some radical change in the system of 
African slavery. . . . The fiery tongues of the 



LOWELL 179 

batteries in Charleston harbor accomplished in 
one day a conversion which the constancy of 
Garrison and the eloquence of Phillips had 
failed to bring about in thirty years." Such 
words were half battles, at that day. 

The biographers of Lowell all agree that he 
was a good editor. This is of course true as to 
taste, judgment, and a steadily widening sympa- 
thy. On the business side of editorship, how- 
ever, it was a great relief when Fields took the 
helm; and the following two letters will in- 
dicate the point where Lowell was deficient. 
Theodore Parker had died on May 10, i860, and 
I had taken pains to write promptly a sketch of 
him, based on intimate knowledge, for early 
publication in the Atlantic. Then followed a 
delay which I could not understand, but which 
the second letter explains. 

Cambridge, June 28, i860. 

My dear Higginson, — I supposed you would under- 
stand as going without saying that I am always glad 
of an article from you. I can't use it however before 
September. I have to make it a rule not to acknowledge 
articles sent to me — or I should have time for nothing 
else. You can conceive. Celia Thaxter's poem I like 
and will print. I think we ought to notice Parker and 



l80 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

should like to have your article. I think that folks have 
confounded (as they commonly do) force with power in 
estimating him and so have overrated him. 

Cordially yours, 

J. R. L. 

Cambridge, August 27, i860. 

My dear Higginson, — Your article on Parker is by 
this time in type for the October number. I should 
have printed it before had I known that it was in my pos- 
session. As ill-luck would have it, it was the bottom one 
of a bundle of Mss. which I was working down through 
with no notion that it contained anything but anonymous 
matter. I wondered you had not sent it, . . . 

I like your Parker very much — though I question the 
epithet " ttoble frankness " which you apply to his treat- 
ment of the dead — who couldn't answer. But I think you 
have treated the subject with great judgment and discre- 
tion. Your twenty languages is a good many. 
Cordially yours, 

J. R. Lowell. 

It is a curious fact that while the delineation 

of Parker in the " Fable for Critics " is perhaps 

the best ever given, yet he and Lowell never 

quite sympathized. What I called "noble" 

frankness in Parker's series of obituary sermons, 

was based upon the general habit which had 

prevailed up to that time of making such 

things absolutely colorless except for flattery; 

so that Parker's fine address on John Quincy 



LOWELL l8l 

Adams came as an absolute surprise, which his 
*' Historic Americans " continued. My phrase 
"twenty languages" was an understatement 
of those in which Parker had at least dabbled. 
On the other hand, Parker always maintained 
that Lowell was not thoroughly in earnest and 
"had no enemies," which seemed to me equally 
one-sided with Lowell's criticisms upon himself. 
I had always supposed that the two appoint- 
ments of Lowell as foreign minister proceeded 
from the influence of his classmate and fellow- 
townsman, Charles Devens, who was a mem- 
ber of President Hayes's cabinet; but General 
Devens himself assured me, long after, that the 
original suggestion came from the President 
himself and grew out of his liking for the 
" Biglow Papers." Lowell wrote me on 
June 1 6, 1877, after his appointment : " I am 
much obliged to you for your congratulation, 
though I myself am very doubtful about accept- 
ing. However, Spain will be of some use to 
me in the way of my studies, and doubtless 
I shall enjoy myself when I get there." How 
greatly he clung to the thoughts of home, even 
in his English position, will be plain from the 



1 82 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

following sweet and simple letter, written to 
acknowledge the report of the celebration of 
the 200th anniversary of the city of Cambridge 
which I had sent him. There is something 
peculiarly noteworthy in the abrupt transition 
from the thought of English life to that of his 
five grandchildren. The ''meeting" to which 
he refers was that on the death of President 
Garfield. 

Legation of the United States, 
London, October 8, i88i. 
Dear Higginson, — Thanks for your excellent address 
and many thanks for your friendly letter. These views out 
of the past grow sweeter {jiot because they are distant) 
as we grow older. I am glad that you are well and happy. 
****** 
I read every word of the 2ooth celebration and thought it 
all exceedingly well done and in good taste. I have not time 
to say more, for I am just starting for the Continent on a 
leave of absence which I sorely need. Wish me joy, I am 
going to Italy! Whether I may not find somebody else in 
my chair at the Legation when I come back is one of those 
problems that I cannot solve and care little about, though 
now that I have made friendships here I should like to 
stay on a little longer. Did you know that I have five 
grandchildren ? 

I shall order a copy of the proceedings of our meeting 
here to be sent you. 

Faithfully and hastily yours, 

J. R. Lowell. 



LOWELL 183 

The following letter was written when I was 
editing '' Harvard Memorial Biographies " and 
had asked him to write of his nephew, General 
Charles Russell Lowell. The latter part refers 
to a paper I had written for the North American 
Review on " Children's Books of the Year." 
Few letters, I think, were so scintillating as 
Lowell's ; everything that he touched gave out 
its little electric spark. 

Elmwood, January 10, 1866. 

My dear Higginson, — I think the best man to write 
a sketch of Charley for the Libro D''Oro would be John 
Bancroft. It should be somebody that knew him from a 
much nearer level of age than I did. A boy don't tell his 
dreams to his uncle of another generation. Moreover, his 
father does not wish me to do it, lest it should interfere 
with something more at length which we propose. The 
obstacle has been, as you know, the paucity of letters 
that can properly be provided so soon. James left much 
ampler materials, and Child will do a portrait of him for 
you which will be as good as love can make it. 

I am very glad you have undertaken the editorship of 
the volumes, because it insures a good tone. If others 
should fail you, I will do Charley, but for other reasons 
than those I mentioned I think it better not. 

I read your article in the Review with much satisfac- 
tion. A light touch is so rare! I growled a little over 
what you say of Abbott [author of the Rollo Books], who is 



1 84 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

my Ogre, whose business it is to eat fairy-children. I was 
surprised that you did not speak of Hawthorne's children- 
books. To me they are full of charm. 

I hear you [are] to come hither a lecturing. If so, 
there is a bed here which will welcome you warmly. 
Yours truly always, 

J. R. Lowell. 

He could have certainly written nothing more 
charming in reference to his three lost nephews 
than when he described, at the beginning of his 
essay " On a Certain Condescension in For- 
eigners," his walks from Elm wood to Harvard 
Square about 1870: "The war was ended. I 
might walk townward without that aching dread 
of bulletins that had darkened the July sunshine 
and twice made the scarlet leaves of October 
seem stained with blood. I remember with a 
pang half proud, half painful, how, so many 
years ago, I had walked over the same path 
and felt round my finger the soft pressure of a 
little hand that was one day to harden with faith- 
ful grip of sabre. On how many paths, leading 
to how many homes where proud memory does 
all she can to fill up the fireside gaps with shin- 
ing shapes, must not men be walking in just 
such pensive moods as I ? Ah, young heroes. 



LOWELL 185 

safe in immortal youth as those of Homer, you 
at least carried your ideal hence untarnished ! 
It is locked for you beyond moth or rust in the 
treasure chamber of death." 

In comparing Holmes and Lowell, we are at 
once struck by the smaller number of personal 
antagonisms inspired by the former ; and also 
by a singular intellectual divergence between 
them. As to fertility of mind, abundance 
of resources, variety of knowledge, there was 
scarcely any difference ; the head of water was 
the same, and why was it that in the case 
of Holmes the stream flowed so much more 
smoothly ? Of the two, moreover, it was Lowell 
who had sedulously trained himself to be a writer ; 
he accepted this as his sphere, while Holmes re- 
garded literature as a mere avocation, not as his 
vocation ; yet it was Lowell who never quite at- 
tained smoothness or finish in utterance, while 
Holmes easily attained it. Lowell was always 
liable to be entangled by his own wealth of 
thought ; his prose and verse alike are full of in- 
volved periods, conundrums within conundrums. 
He begins his Moosehead journal with this 
abstruse and craggy sentence: " Thursday, nth 



1 86 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

August. — I knew as little yesterday of the in- 
terior of Maine as the least penetrating person 
knows of the inside of that great social millstone 
which, driven by the river Time, set imperatively 
a-going the several wheels of our individual 
activities." He goes on with his rich and delight- 
ful gossip, but there is never a moment when 
some bit of reminiscence, some good pun, some 
remembered phrase from Sir Thomas Browne, 
may not interrupt the flow of the sentence. 
From this Holmes is far more free ; he takes 
almost as many and as varied flights, but his art 
is better. Sometimes, even in " Elsie Venner," 
he tires you with the details of scientific specu- 
lation ; but the literary part is always well done. 
The defect in this direction began to show itself 
very early in Lowell, and I remember that when 
he began to write in the London Daily News in 
1846, there was a general complaint, both at 
home and abroad, over the longwindedness of 
his prose style. This he overcame, but the 
tumultuous inequality lasted and was, indeed, 
a part of his charm. The London Spectator 
said well of him, " Mr. Lowell's forte is profu- 
sion and his foible prodigality." 



LOWELL 187 

It is curious that English critics, while jeal- 
ously disputing Lowell's claim to rank in the 
highest class of poets, yet often concede to him 
the precise merit which does not belong to him — 
that of uniform and accurate execution. It may 
be said, on the contrary, both of his prose and 
verse, that his immense fertility of mind con- 
stantly led him into confused rhetoric and mixed 
metaphors ; one bright thought or image tread- 
ing on the heels of another, and either displac- 
ing or entangling it. Take, for instance, this 
verse from the " Ode to Happiness " : — 

Wing-footed! thou abid'st with him 
Who asks it not ; but he who hath 
Watched o'er the waves thy waning path, 
Shall nevermore behold returning 
Thy high-heaped canvas shoreward yearning ! 
Thou first reveaPst to us thy face 
Turned o'er the shoulder's parting grace, 

A moment glimpsed, then seen no more, — 
Thou whose swift footsteps we can trace 
Away from every mortal door! 

Here Happiness is first invoked as *' wing- 
footed " ; then her '* path " is watched ; then 
she has " high-heaped canvas " ; then she has 
a "face"; then she leaves "footsteps " at every 



1 88 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

" door." Between the land-dweller with footsteps 
and the sea-rover with canvas there is absolute 
irreconcilableness, and yet the two are inter- 
woven through the whole verse. Such incon- 
gruities as the " drippingly hurried adieu," in 
" An Ember Picture," are of the same quality, 
and in ** The Cathedral," regarded by many as 
his most important poem, there occurred a pun 
which called forth general protest. It will al- 
ways remain a curious fact that Lowell, while 
far more regularly trained to literature than 
Holmes, and not surpassing him in exuberant 
fertility of mind, had yet far less of artistic self- 
control, and has left behind him much more that 
is ragged and imperfectly wrought out. Yet 
Lowell had undoubtedly the finer nature of the 
two, and would have recognized keenly in 
others the very defect he himself manifested. 
Possibly the solution may be in this, that in- 
direct preparation has its merits as well as 
direct; and that Holmes may have learned 
something for literary uses in his own micro- 
scopic work and in his constant anatomical 
demonstrations, just as Agassiz found that 
his scientific skill had already made him a 



LOWELL 189 

good rifle-shot before he had touched the 
weapon. 

The Saturday Review once pointed out as 
the two faults of Lowell's prose writings ** an 
overconfident tone and a grotesqueness of il- 
lustration." It must, undoubtedly, be conceded 
by his admirers that, though he is never coarse, 
yet his taste is not always to be trusted. The 
Saturday Review quoted this sentence from his 
" Shakespeare Once More," " Hamlet and the 
Novum Organum were at the risk of teething 
and the measles at the same time ; " and from 
the paper on Italy, "■ Milton is the only man 
who has got much poetry out of a cataract, 
and that was a cataract in his eye." Of such 
passages the Saturday Review remarked, with 
some reason, that they "are relics of the hob- 
bledehoy stage of literary production," and "are 
serious blemishes in a style making just preten- 
sions to maturity." Akin to this is the remark 
of one of Lowell's few severe critics in his own 
country. Professor W. C. Wilkinson, in his 
" A Free Lance in Life and Letters," who 
makes the " want of firm and harmonious 
tone "to be "the leading vice of his style," 



1 90 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

and produces many instances of this. But it 
is to be noticed that such defects as these 
grew less and less as he matured, and that his 
address on Democracy, for instance, is entirely 
free from them. 

The most serious attack ever made upon 
the literary work of Lowell was a really able 
one, called " Professor Lowell as a Critic," in 
Lippincotf s {innQ, 1871), which appeared anony- 
mously, but was understood to have been 
written by Mr. John Foster Kirk — a paper 
which pronounces him to be "a writer whose 
merits are many and striking, but wholly on 
the surface," and which says of Lowell's ad- 
mirers : *' The qualities they ascribe to their 
idol are precisely those in which he is most 
deficient He is acute, versatile, occasionally 
brilliant; but he is narrow, shallow, and hard, 
destitute of the insight, the comprehension, 
the sympathy, by which the true critic, the 
true poet, searches the domain of thought and 
the recesses of the mind, illumines the emo- 
tions and kindles them." It is impossible not 
to read between the lines of this verdict what 
the writer himself admits, in so many words, to 



LOWELL 191 

be "a sense of grievance." He permits him- 
self to deal with Lowell as the latter himself 
has dealt with Petrarch, Rousseau, Chateau- 
briand, Percival, and Thoreau. From the 
point of view of strict justice, neither Lowell 
nor his critic can be quite vindicated ; although 
each of these two writers is amply furnished 
both with knowledge and acuteness. 

Mr. Lowell had won in London that cordial 
reception and subsequent popularity in both 
literary and aristocratic circles which had, in- 
deed, been accorded in some degree to other 
Americans before him. This truth is suffi- 
ciently established by a slight examination of 
the correspondence of Ticknor or Sumner or 
Motley or Dana. What is most remarkable is 
that he combined this with diplomatic duties 
at a difficult time, and bore also the test 
of repeated invitations to pronounce his esti- 
mate, in the most public way, of the classic 
names of England. American genius and 
scholarship had received English recognition 
before him, but American criticism never. 
The Queen herself said of him when he left, 
that no ambassador had ever excited more in- 



192 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

terest or won more general regard in England. 
On the other hand, Mr. Smalley tells us that 
" never before his time had a departing min- 
ister been honored by addresses and meetings 
and resolutions of great bodies of English 
workingmen. . . . His Americanism was the 
dominant passion of his life; that and not 
poetry nor letters nor even those friendships 
and affections which were to him as the air 
he breathed." Yet it is quite certain that 
this attitude was not quite understood in 
America, for various reasons not now worth 
analyzing, chief of which was the difficult 
position in which he was placed on account 
of Fenianism and from the difficulty of deaHng 
with Irishmen who had been naturalized as 
Americans and then had gone back to dwell 
as agitators in Ireland. Even with American 
visitors in London he was at one time not 
wholly popular, though undoubtedly most of 
the attacks made on him were unjust and 
foolish. He was, for instance, censured for 
beginning a note to Lord Granville as " My 
dear Granville," the censure proceeding from 
those who did not know how much more 



LOWELL 193 

common is this familiar form of address, among 
social equals, in England than in America. 
In the same way the ordinary diplomatic 
courtesies such as " He was good enough to 
say," or " I am bound to take for granted," 
or, " My friend, if I may be permitted to 
call him so," were censured as " circumlocu- 
tionary and apologetic," and it was said that 
he used to talk " in a straightforward, honest, 
American fashion." All this class of criticism 
was instantly swept away by his lecture on 
Democracy, which at once silenced these un- 
reasonable voices ; and which must be re- 
garded, on the whole, as his best and most 
characteristic prose work, — the frankest, the 
maturest, the clearest and simplest in literary 
style. 

Lowell had perhaps never seemed so at- 
tractive as during the last year or two of his 
life, when restored again to the house where 
he was born. The revision of his books for 
a definitive edition gave him the occupation 
most appropriate to the old age of a literary 
man, who thus watches moving before his eyes 
from day to day, as in a magic mirror, the 



194 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

joys and griefs, hopes and fears, of an honored 
and useful career. Softened and mellowed by 
time, as well as enriched by it, he was bear- 
ing bravely the trials of a hopeless disease and 
awaiting cheerfully the end. He was broader 
in experience, serener in judgment, sweeter in 
temper, than ever before ; and was a source of 
happiness, rather than of care, to all around him. 
I have found among my papers some hasty 
notes of a talk with him in this Indian sum- 
mer of his life, and print them just as they 
stand, only wishing that there were more of 
them : — 

"December 28, 1888. 

" Lowell looked far better and younger than 
last winter, and seemed bright, alert, clear- 
eyed and strong, though he complained of 
gout. He talked most agreeably about his life 
abroad — said that his life in England was 
much easier than in Spain, where the consuls 
were incompetent and referred all to him, so 
that he wrote three quarto volumes of corre- 
spondence, all unnecessary. Also his secre- 
tary knew neither Spanish nor French. He 
said the Spaniards were easy to get on with 



LOWELL 



195 



after they found he would not take money and 
was to be regarded as a gentleman. They sus- 
pected of this and so did he. 

" He thought Phelps could have settled the 
fishery question and the Sackville question — 
in the latter he thought Cleveland acted hastily. 
In England they could not understand his ac- 
tion, because it was not considered that disre- 
spect to a President meant the same as to a 
Queen — which he (L.) had urged upon them. 

"Thought Phelps far better fitted than him- 
self, as being a business man, which he hated. 

" Is revising * Fable for Critics ' ; had not 
read it for years and did not wonder it gave 
dissatisfaction. Means to put a preface ex- 
plaining that he did not really write it for pub- 
lication, but as a jeu d' esprit ; and sent it to 
Briggs, who took responsibility of publishing. 

"Said that Browning had a good deal of jeal- 
ousy of Tennyson, whereas Tennyson was too 
absorbed in himself to be jealous of Browning. 
B, has Jewish blood, but will not admit it. 
[I asked his reasons for thinking B. Jewish.] 
No one who has studied his face can doubt it. 
He used in one case a Hebrew line, then can- 



196 OLD CAMBRIDGE 

celled it in a later edition. Besides, if you 
dine with a Jew in London, you are sure to 
meet Browning." [These arguments seemed 
to me quite insufficient.] 

His death (Aug. 12, 1891) took from us a 
man rich beyond all other Americans in poetic 
impulses, in width of training, in varied ex- 
perience, and in readiness of wit; sometimes 
entangled and hampered by his own wealth; 
unequal in expression, yet rising on the great- 
est occasions to the highest art; blossoming 
early, yet maturing late; with a certain indo- 
lence of temperament, yet accomplishing all 
the results of strenuous labor; not always 
judicial in criticism, especially in early years, 
yet steadily expanding and deepening; retain- 
ing in age the hopes and sympathies of his 
youth ; and dying, with singular good fortune, 
just after he had gathered into final shape 
the literary harvest of his life. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbott, Jacob, 183. 
Adams, C. F., 113. 
Adams, Pres. J. Q., 13, 181. 
Addison, Joseph, 53. 
Agassiz, Prof. Louis, 17, 188. 
Alcott, A. B., 55, 62, 63, 104, 

167. 
Aldrich, T. B., 69, 70. 
Allston, Washington, 14, 15. 
Appleton, Nathan, 130. 
Appleton, Rev. Samuel, 10. 
Appleton, T. G., 63, 88, 89. 
Apthorp, W. F., 70. 
Arnold, Matthew, 148. 
Astor, Mrs. J. J., 93. 
Austin, Mrs. Sarah, 140. 

Bachi, Pietro, 17. 

Baldwin, Mrs. Loammi (Nancy 

Williams), 75. 
Balzac, Honore de, 142. 
Bancroft, George, 14, 44, 116. 
Bancroft, John, 183. 
Bartlett, Robert, 55, 62. 
Beck, Charles, 17. 
Belcher, Andrew, 19. 
Bell, Dr. L. V., 113. 
Biglow, Mrs., house of, 5. 
Boardman, Andrew, 9. 
Bowen, Prof. Francis, 44, 46, 47, 

53. 174- 
Brattle, Gen. William, 150. 
Bremer, Fredrika, 147. 
Briggs, C. F., 160, 172, 175, 195. 
Brown, John, 177. 



Brown, Dr. Thomas, 59. 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 186. 
Browning, Robert, 132, 195, 196. 
Bryant, W. C, 35. 
Burns, Anthony, 177. 
Burroughs, Stephen, 30. 
Byron, Lord, 46. 

Cabot, J. E., 68. 
Carey & Lea, publishers, ii£. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 53, 140. 
Carter, Robert, 46, 47, 67, 69. 
Channing, Prof. E. T., 14, 15, 44. 
Channing, Prof. Edward, 15. 
Channing, Rev. W. E., 116. 
Channing, W. E. (of Concord), 

58. 64. 
Channing, W. H., 15, 57, 64, 104, 

167. 
Channing, Dr. Walter, 84. 
Chateaubriand, Vicomte, 191. 
Chatterton, Thomas, 114. 
Chauncey, Pres. Charles, 7, 8, 9. 
Cheever, Rev. G. B., 94, 113. 
Cheney, S. W., 169, 170. 
Chester, Capt. John, 20. 
Child, F. J., 183. 
Clarke, Rev. J. F., 57, 104. 
Cleveland, Pres. Grover, 195. 
Cleveland, H. R., 123. 
Cogswell, J. G., 14, 27, 116, 117. 
Coleridge, S. T., 38, 91, 95. 
CoUamer, Jacob, 161. 
Cooper, J. F., 35. 
Craigie, Mrs., 124, 129. 



199 



200 



INDEX 



Cranch, C. P., 58, 64, 70. 
Crichton, the Admirable, 155. 
Curtis, G. T., 16. 
Cuvier, Baron, 35. 

Dana, Francis, 15. 
Dana, R. H., 14, 15. 
Dana, R. H., Jr., 15, 191. 
Dana, Richard, 15. 
Danforth, Samuel, 152. 
Davis, Admiral C. H., 113. 
Davy, Sir Humphry, 95. 
Daye, Matthew, 6. 
Daye, Stephen, 5, 6. 
Devens, Gen. Charles, 181. 
Devens, S. A., 76. 
Dickens, Charles, 123. 
Dowse, Thomas, 18. 
Dunster, Pres. Henry, 5, 6. 
Dwight, J. S., 57, 58, 63, 137. 
Dwight, Prof. Thomas, 94, 96. 

Elder, William, 67. 

Eliot, Rev. John, 6, 

Eliot, Rev. Richard, 7. 

Emerson, R. W., 34, 53, 54, 57, 
60, 62, 63, 64, 68, 70, 85, 86, 90, 
91, 104, 139, 158, 166, 168, 169. 

Everett, Pres. Edward, 14, 27, 
44, 117, 123. 

Everett, Dr. William, 17. 

Fayerweather, Thomas, 150. 

Felton, Prof. C. C, 44, 69, 123, 
124, 128. 

Fields, J. T., 69, 104, 106, 179. 

Fiske, Prof. John, 70. 

Flagg, Wilson, 70. 

Follen, Prof. Charles, 17. 

Fox, Thomas, 9. 

Francis, Prof. Convers, 17. 

Fuller, Margaret (Countess Os- 
soli), 22, 25, 26, 36, 47, 54, 55, 
57, 58, 60, 119, 129, 150, 174. 



Gage, Gen., 21. 
Garfield, Pres. J. A., 182. 
Garrison, W. L., 85, 104, 179. 
Glover, Rev. Joseph, 5. 
Glover, Widow, 6. 
Godwin, Parke, 35, 67. 
Goethe, J. W., 63, 116. 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 11, 95. 
Goodale, Prof. G. L., 12. 
Granville, Lord, 192. 
Green, Samuel, 6. 
Greenwood, Isaac, 13. 
Griswold, R. W., 35, 160. 

Hale, Rev. Dr. E. E., 156. 

Hancock, John, 20. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 34, 112, 
113, 119, 135, 170. 

Hayes, Pres. R. B., 181. 

Hedge, Rev. Dr. F. H., 17, 25, 
26, 54. 57. 59. 60, 63, 113. 

Hedge, J. D., 23, 24. 

Hedge, Prof. Levi, 14, 22, 23. 

Heth, Joyce, 97. 

Higginson, S. T., 153. 

Higginson, T. W., 70, 76, 81, 
179, 180, 182, 183. 

Hildreth, Richard, 67. 

Hillard, G. S., 123, 128. 

Hoar, E. R., 34. 

Holmes, Rev. Abiel, 15, 75. 

Holmes, John, 15, 30, 166. 

Holmes, Mrs. Mary Jane, 98. 

Holmes, O. W., 11, 15, 21, 23, 24, 
26, 32, 33. 36, 37. 38. 53. 58, 59. 
63, 68, 69, 70; theory of biog- 
raphy, 75 ; letter about engage- 
ment of his parents, 75; his 
letter in reply, 76 ; childhood, 
77-81 ; letter of thanks for a 
reminiscence of his father, 81; 
early manhood, 82-84; medi- 
cal practice and professorship, 
84 ; lecturing, 85 ; influence of 



INDEX 



201 



Emerson, 85-86; middle life, 
86 ; success of " The Auto- 
crat," 86-87 ; as a talker, 88-90 ; 
literary opinions, 90-91 ; char- 
acteristics, 92-93 ; relations to 
science, 94-96 ; heresies, 96-98 ; 
" Elsie Venner," 98 ; religion, 
98-102 ; Little Boston, his favor- 
ite character, 103 ; clubs, 104- 
105; wit, 106; later life, 107- 
108; death, 108; iii, 114, 125, 
127, 135, 136, 147, 148, 15s, 158, 
185, 186, 188. 

Holmes, O. W., Jr., 105. 

Horace, 55, 113. 

Howe, Dr. S. G., 104. 

Howells, W. D., 69, 70. 

Hughes, Thomas, 177. 

Hurlbut, W. H., afterward Hurl- 
bert, 66. 

Ingraham, J. H., 139. 
Irving, Washington, 35, 117. 

Jackson, Miss Harriot, 75. 
Jacobs, Miss S. S., 58, 
James, Henry, Sr., 70. 
James, Henry, Jr., 70. 
James, William, 70. 
Jennison, William, 23. 
Jewett, J. P., 65, 67, 68. 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 90. 
Johnson, Eastman, 170. 

Keats, John, 174. 
Kimball, J. W., 99. 
Kirk, J. F., 190. 
Kirkland, Pres. J. T., 116. 
Kneeland, Dr., 23. 
Kossuth, Louis, 46. 

Lachapelle, Madame, 96. 
Langdon, Pres. Samuel, 21. 
Lathrop, G. P., 70. 
Lechmere, Mrs., 151. 



Lechmere, Richard, 150. 

Lee, Judge Joseph, 150, 152. 

Lee, Mrs., 151. 

Letcher, Gov., 178. 

Lindley, John, 100. 

Livermore, George, 18. 

Longfellow, H. W., 11, 24, 32, 33, 
36, 37, 44, 65, 68, 69, 70, 86, 107 ; 
early life, iii; comparison of 
Bowdoin and Harvard, 11 1- 
112; plans of life, 114-115; 
Bowdoin professorship, 116; 
first visit to Europe, 116; Euro- 
pean work, 117-118; early 
sketches, 118-119; marriage, 
119-122; removal to Cam- 
bridge, 123; friendships, 124; 
Craigie House, 124-127 ; ap- 
pearance, 128-129 ; second 
marriage, 130; "Hiawatha," 
131; "Evangeline," 131; 
"Psalm of Life," 131-133 ; 
" Hyperion," 134; diaries, 134- 
135 ; troublesome correspon- 
dents, 136; influence upon 
music, 137 ; kind words to 
Poe, 137 ; critics, 138 ; transla- 
tions, 140; college work irk- 
some, 141 ; as a teacher, 142- 
143; death, 144; 147, 150, 170. 

Longfellow, Mrs. H. W. (Mary 
S. Potter), 119, 122. 

Longfellow, Mrs. H. W. (Frances 
M. Appleton), 130. 

Longhorn, Thomas, 9. 

Lowell, C. R., 159. 

Lowell, Gen. C. R., Jr., 183. 

Lowell, Rev. Charles, 16, 116. 

Lowell, Maj. J. J., 183. 

Lowell, J. R., 16, 21, 24, 26, 28, 

29. 30. 31. 32, 33. 36, 37. 38, 44. 
46, 47, 48, 51, S3, 58, 64. 65, 67, 
68, 69, 70, 85, 86, 89, 90, 105, 
107, III, 112, 114, 124, 125, 127, 



202 



INDEX 



129, 13s, 141; influence of 
Cambridge, 147 ; love of Elm- 
wood, 148 ; Tory Row, 150 ; 
traditions of Elmwood, 151- 
153; as a boy, 154; college 
life, 155-158 ; influence of 
Maria White, 159; picture of 
daily life, 160-172; popularity, 
172-173; imaginary magazine, 
174 ; traits of character, 175 ; 
letter about Temperance Con- 
vention, 176 ; death of his 
wife, 176-177; editor Atlantic 
Motithly, 178-180 ; foreign 
minister, 181-182; his neph- 
ews, 183-184; compared with 
Holmes, 185-186; fertility of 
mind, 187-188 ; prose writings, 
189-190 ; popularity in Lon- 
don, 191-192 ; later hfe, 193- 
195 ; death, 196. 

Lowell, Mrs. J. R. (Maria 
White), 159, 162, 176. 

Lowell, Percival, 94. 

Lowell, Rev. R. T. S., 16. 

Lowell, Miss Sally, 125. 

Macaulay, T. B., 88. 
Mackenzie, Lieut. A. S., 117. 
Mather, Cotton, 4, 7. 
Mather, Pres. Increase, 7. 
Mather, Rev. Richard, 7. 
Milton, John, 90, 189. 
Mitchell, Dr. Weir, 82. 
Moore, Thomas, 91. 
Morse, J. T., Jr., 92, 100. 
Morton, Thomas, 29. 
Motley, J. L., 63, 68, 71, 83, 191. 

Newell, W. W., 150. 

Norton, Andrews, 14, 44, 48, 49. 

Norton, Prof. C. E., 16, 28, 37, 44, 

148, 160, 172. 
Nuttall, Thomas, 13. 



Oakes, Pres. Urian, 7. 
Oliver, Mrs., 151. 
Ohver, Lieut. Gov., 153. 
Oliver, Lieut. Thomas, 150, 151, 
152. 

Page, W. H., 69. 
Palfrey, Rev. J. G., 16, 44, 50. 
Palfrey, Miss Sarah H., 16. 
Parker, Rev. Theodore, 53, 58, 

62, 63, 67, 104, 179, 180, 181. 
Parsons, Charles, 77. 
Parsons, T. W., 67. 
Paul, Jean (see Richter). 
Peirce, Benjamin, 16. 
Peirce, Prof. Benjamin, 143. 
Peirce, C. S., 16. 
Peirce, J. M., 16. 
Percival, J. G., 175, 191. 
Perry, T. S., 70. 
Petrarch, Francis, 191. 
Phelps, E. J., 195. 
Phillips, M. D., 68. 
Phillips, Wendell, 104, 179. 
Phillips, Willard, 44. 
Pierce, Pres. Franklin, 113. 
Poe, E. A., 137, 144, 173. 
Pope, Alexander, 90, 91. 
Popkin, Dr. J. S., 23. 
Potter, Barrett, 119, 
Pratt, Dexter, 126. 
Pratt, Rowena, 126, 
Putnam, Rev. George, 54. 
Putnam, Mrs. S. R., 16. 
Puttenham, George, 159. 

Quincy, Edmund, 67, 104. 
Quincy, Pres. Josiah, 29, 43, 157. 

Read, Gen. Meredith, 132. 
Richter, J. P. F., 85, 116. 
Riedesel, Baroness, 149, 150. 
Ripley, George, 48, 54, 57, 67, 113. 
Rossetti, D. G., 132. 



1NDE5C 



20' 



Rousseau, J. J., 191. 
Ruggles, Mrs., 151. 
Ruggles, Capt. George, 150. 
Russell, Miss P., 75. 

Sackville, Lord, 195. 
Sales, Francis, 17, 23. 
Sanborn, F. B., 156, 174, I77- 
Scott, Sir Walter, 26, 35, 177- 
Scott, Sir William, 45. 
Scudder, H. E., 69, 70. 
Sewall, Samuel, 12. 
Sewell, Jonathan, 12. 
Seward, W. H., 178. 
Shaler, Prof. N. S., 70. 
Shepard, Rev. Thomas, 3, 5, 7. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 159. 
Smalley, G. A., 192. 
Smith, Sydney, 105. 
Smollett, Tobias, 95. 
Sparks, Pres. Jared, 14, 44, 128. 
Spenser, Edmund, 47, 154. 
Storer, Dr. D. H., 113. 
Story, Judge Joseph, 16, 44. 
Story, W. W., 16, 26, 70, 154. 15S 
Stowe, Rev. C. E., 90, 113. 
Stowe, Mrs. H. B., 65, 66, 90. 
Sumner, Charles, 104, 123, 132, 

191. 
Swift, Dean, 95, 166. 
Swinburne, A. C, 132. 

Tennyson, Lord, 132, 195. 
Thaxter, Celia, 179. 
Thaxter, L. L., 174. 
Thayer, Nathaniel, 106. 
Thoreau, H. D., 34, 58, 67, 191. 
Ticknor, Prof. George, 14, 27, 117, 

121, 122, 191. 
Tracy, John, 78. 
Trowbridge, J. T., 65. 
Tuckerman, H. T., 172. 



Tudor, William, 44. 
Tufts, Henry, 30. 

Underwood, F. H., 65, 66, 67, 68, 
69. 87. 

Vane, Harry, 19. 
Vassall family, 22, 79, 148. 
Vassal], Mrs. John, 151. 
Vassall, Col. Henry, 150. 
Vassall, Col. John, 150, 151. 
Vassall, Mrs. Penelope, 150, 151. 
Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 124. 

Walker, S. C, 113. 
Ware family, 15. 
Ware, Rev. Henry, 157. 
Ware, John, 157. 
Ware, William, 50. 
Washington, George, 56. 
Wasson, Rev. D. A., 104. 
Weiss, Rev. John, 104. 
Welde, Rev. Thomas, 7. 
Wells, William, 150. 
Wendell, Miss Sally, 75. 
Wheeler, C. S., 140. 
Whipple, E. P., 35- 
Whittier, J. G., 67, 70. 107, 136. 
Wigglesworth, Rev. Edward, 8. 
Wild, Jonathan, 165. 
Wilkinson, Prof. W. C, 189. 
Willis, N. P., 33. 173- 
Wilson, Rev. John, 19. 
Winthrop, Hannah, 19. 
Winthrop, Gov. John, 3, 4, 19. 
Winthrop, Prof. John, 13. 
Woodberry, Prof. G. E., 70. 
Worcester, Dr. J. E., 51. 

Young, Edward (Latin transla- 
tion of " Night Thoughts "), 12. 

Zola, Emile, 95. 



TALES OF THE ENCHANTED ISLES 
OF THE ATLANTIC 

Legends Current before the Discovery of America 

BY 

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 

Author of "Malbone," "Cheerful Yesterdays," etc. 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
ALBERT HERTER 



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MATTHEW ARNOLD 

ASPECTS OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

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HEART OF MAN 

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